Literary and linguistic innovation within Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

Abstract

Cief om predldadanej pnice Je analyza diela sucasnej indickej spisovatel'ky Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things. Pozornost je nasmerovami predovsetkym k tym momentom diela, ktore ho zarad'uju do prudu tzv. postmodernej literatury. Termfnom ,postmodernf sa tu oznacuje suhrn charakteristfk tak ako ich zhrnula Susan Watkins. Je to predovsetkym strata explikatfvnej funkcie tzv. vel'kych prfbehov a s tym suvisiaci ironicky pohfad na minulost, miesanie tzv. vysokych a nfzkych umeleckych foriem, intertextualita a hra s jazykom, ako aj autoreferencia nanicie. Analyza romanu-prebieha na dvoch urovniach: formalnej a obsahovej. Priestor pre formalny rozbor je vyhradeny v kapitolach Jazyk a Naratfv. Jazyk v romane podlieha experimentu a jeho analyza kladie doraz na jeho expresivitu a poetickost. Z toho vychadza aj druM cast kapitoly 0 jazyku, ktora sa zameriava prave na postmoderny moment hry a autoreferencie. Naratfvu je venovana ustredna kapitola prace. Formalne je prfbeh romanu roztriesteny do niekol'kych casovych a priestorovych rovfn. Obsahovo a metaforicky prfbeh romanu pripomfna stare indicke myty a tato juxtapozfcia ironizuje moznost "vel'keho" prfbehu ako uzavreteho celku s univerzalnou platnostou. Z toho vycMdza aj teoreticka analyza v druhej casti kapitoly podlozena strukturalistickou te6riou rozpravania...

In October 1997 it came as a great surprise that Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things was awarded a Booker Prize for fiction, which in the last three decades had become the "paper Nobel" for writers from the Commonwealth. The book was chosen from a list of six other novels in which Roy was, besides Mick Jackson, the only first time novelist. 1 The novel, according to R.K. Dhawan, was not the most favoured by the judges. He writes "There was - a general feeling amongst the critics that, despite its popular appeal, it might not win the Booker.,,2 Nevertheless, the decision turned to Roy's book and almost five years of hard and creative work brought its reward. The book became a best selling "mega wonder" over night and sold more copies than any other Booker winner in the history of the contest. The novel has been translated into more than forty languages3 and became a popular subject of academic studies. There is little room for doubt when stating that the path to popularity and importance for The God of Small Things has already been pre-paved by Salman Rushdie "who put Indian writing on an International literary map,,4; by Rushdie, the "messiah" for the Indian novel in English of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century. The appearance of his Midnight's Children "brought about a renaissance...