Surviving Death In Arundhati Roy`s `the God Of Small Things` And Michael Ondaatje`s `anil`s Ghost`

The tenor of the times has changed. Death in combat is no longer universally considered the heroic action it was before the First World War. Mass slaughter and mechanised warfare has left a time of chivalry and jingoism behind. Sarah Koffman`s assertion that "since Auschwitz, all men [.] die differently [.] they survive death because [.] death in Auschwitz was worse than death" is particularly applicable when considering Arundhati Roy`s The God of Small Things and Michael Ondaatje`s Anil`s Ghost. Roy and Ondaatje`s novels are appeals against institutionalised violence which seems a permanent fixture in contemporary newsrooms. Both authors recognise that the implication of Koffman`s statement death post-Auschwitz is that the deaths of those involved in violence can no longer be neatly concluded. They recognise that such men must now `die differently`. Ondaatje`s Anil`s Ghost follows the efforts of Anil Tissera, a Western educated Sri Lankan and forensic anthropologist who is sent back to her homeland to find evidence for government murders of civilians. Under such circumstances, the death of Sarath Diysena, one of her co-workers, is problematised by Koffman`s assertion. Similarly, in The God of Small Things the brutal murder of the untouchable Velutha after he is found to be sleeping with the protagonist`s touchable mother, cannot be neatly concluded. In order to examine the implications of Kofman`s statement on Roy and Ondaatje`s novels, I shall consider the texts in light of the positioning of Sarath and Velutha in relation to the violence practised on them, repetitions within the texts and the denial of closure. The manner of Sarath and Velutha`s murders is complicated by the circumstances under which they take place, in this case the undermining of an authority that violates human rights. Repetition in the novels causes death to expand beyond the murder of an individual and so have wider consequences, as Koffman purports that death at Auschwitz did. This leads to a lack of closure, which allows a character to survive death because no death certificate can certify the wider consequences of their death and so offer a concluding remark. This gap left in the traditional narrative structure then leaves a space open for haunting. A denial of closure also flouts Western expectations of the novel, leaving readers with a deep sense of dissatisfaction. Western desire for epistemophilia culminates in the need for the denouement which leads to a sense of catharsis. The denial of this causes the novel`s traumas to live on in readers, even in something as small as mild dissatisfaction.

The hypothesis that Koffman`s statement on the mindset of the 20th Century affects the narrative styles of Roy and Ondaatje`s novels particularly applicable when considering the their title characters as both Sarath and Velutha gain greater significance posthumously than they achieve in life. On the issue of whom or what Anil`s ghost is, I will defer to Ondaatje`s assertion that "Anil would always carry with ghost of Sarath Diysena". Velutha is unarguably the God of Small Things in Ammu`s dream and these two victims haunt the texts to which they give name, and so voice. Their deaths are problematised by the wider implications of the brutality to which they fall foul and as victims of politicised violence in novels that are arguably deeply political in nature, there is a necessity for Sarath and Velutha to die differently and in doing so, become allegories for something larger.

Therefore, an analysis of the positioning of their bodies in relation to the violence inflicted upon them is central to a reading of how they `survive death`. In the case of Velutha, Roy`s emphasis falls on the systematic brutality of his murder. The act of violence itself is the most important aspect; the physical destruction of the body of Velutha becomes not the beating of a man, but an exercise in "exorcising fear". Velutha is dehumanised in several stages, leading to the eventual loss of his identity and his erasure from history. Until the simple declarative "they woke Velutha with their boots" , he has been referred to animalistically as `the quarry" and in the passage directly following his identification, Velutha is reduced to "a man". The persistent use of the indefinite article throughout this passage removes the personal from the violence. The beating on the back veranda of Ayemenem`s History House is further removed from Velutha himself by Roy`s decision to place emphasis on sound rather than sight. Onomatopoeic lexis - "crunch", "gurgle", "thud" - and the use of sibilance in "the shout of sleep surprised by shattered kneecaps" allow for the identity of the man being beaten to become secondary to the brutality itself. Roy`s final act to erase Velutha`s identity manifests itself through the twins. Rahel`s insistence that Velutha is his fictional twin brother Urumban is at first rejected by Estha but when he loses his desire to speak about the truth of what the Touchable policemen did, he allows himself to say to Rahel `It wasn`t him. It was Urumban` and thus the erasure of Velutha`s identity is complete. This is violence at its most deliberate, paralleled by the shooting of the eighteen month old twins in Anil`s Ghost. Roy writes that it is "sober, steady brutality" and this is reflected in the movement of her usually florid language into the realms of the clinical - "they were inoculating a community". Velutha , in a very literal way, dies differently, beaten to death by men who no longer recognise his humanity.