Postcolonial Fiction and the Question of Influence: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things and Rumer Godden

Tickell, Alex (2020). Postcolonial Fiction and the Question of Influence: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things and Rumer Godden. Postcolonial Text, 15(1)

Abstract

This article reflects on formal and technical similarities in the writing of Arundhati Roy and Rumer Godden through a close parallel examination of three works by Godden: Black Narcissus (1939), The River (1946), and The Peacock Spring (1975) and Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). I use the possibility of an unrecognized dialogue between Godden’s and Roy’s fictions to tackle the broader issue of “influence” as a critical-conceptual elephant in the room of postcolonial literary studies: something that can only be spoken of in certain ways, using a certain vocabulary. I ask why certain critical assumptions—amongst them the politics of “writing back,” a kind of ironic formal auto-critique and a tendency to avoid “vertical” comparison between earlier and later texts in the post/colony except as a resistant form of reiterative citation—have made the question of “influence” a peculiarly difficult one to pose (and to answer) in postcolonial literary contexts.

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