Autobiographical Fiction

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Global Journal of English Language and Literature
April 2014. Volume 2. Issue 2.
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/globaljournalofell/
Self as Extended Metaphor: The God of Small Things
Shruti Das
About the Author(s): Dr Shruti Das is an associate professor in the P.G.Department of English in Berhampur
University in Odisha, India. E-mail: drshrutidas@gmail.com
rundhati Roy was born in 1961 in Kerala. Her mother, a native of Kerala, is a
Syrian Christian and her father a Hindu from Bengal. The marriage of Roy’s
parents failed when she was about two years old, and she spent her childhood
years in Ayemenem with her mother and brother in her mother’s ancestral home. The
influence of these early years permeates her writings, both thematically and structurally. Just
a week before the launch of her book The God of Small Things (TGST henceforth), in 1997,
in an interview to Outlook India, Roy talks about the role of autobiography in her fiction. She
says that she has ‘invested herself’ in the book and that the book is more about ‘human
biology than human history.’ In the interview she explains:
“I've just come back from Kerala, where my brother and my mother read the book for
the first time. My brother, Lalith, is in many ways the most privileged reader of the
book because we shared a childhood, blew spit bubbles together, misunderstood the
adult world together—and have now, grown into completely different lives—we're
completely different. … When he read it he said something which nobody else could
have said—he said the really real (autobiographical) things in the book are not the
characters or the incidents, but the feelings, the love, the fear, the terror. Not the
events. Not the main narrative. It's the emotional texture that's real. Of course people
will inevitably make connections—yes, Estha and Rahel are half Bengali and half
Malayali. Yes, my mother was divorced. Yes, I grew up in a pickle factory”
(outlookindia.com 1997).
A

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Roy admits that the novel has a strong autobiographical foundation with real locales. She
says: “But this forms the external detail—it isn't the bedrock on which the book is built. Not
the deep substance of fiction” (outlookindia.com 1997). TGST thus, is not a memoir or an
autobiography; it is a work of fiction belonging to the genre of autobiographical fiction. In
this paper I intend to analyze TGST and bring to focus how fictional moments replete with
drama, conflict and dialogue override the autobiographical elements in the text. But keeping
in view the paucity of time and the limited scope of the presentation I shall limit myself to the
depiction of the mother as an auto-fictional character in the novel.
At this point it is relevant to note the difference between autobiography, memoir and
autobiographical fiction in a nutshell. Autobiography is a form of literary discourse that
considers life writing where the self is constructed and constituted within a specifically
located space. Smith and Watson (2001) historicize autobiography in the West as a literary
genre in their Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Live Narratives. Although a
practice of writing autobiographically extends further back to, or even before, the Greeks and
the Romans, according to Smith & Watson, the recent usage of the term autobiography
appeared in the late eighteenth century. The usage is carried out by “the concept of self-
interested individual intent on assessing the status of the soul or the meaning of public
achievement” (5). Autobiography in this usage celebrates the individual’s personal growth
through her public achievement. And a memoir, as Julie Rak notes, “has been treated by most
critics of autobiography as a poor relative of autobiography discourse, a secondary form of
life writing like diaries, confessions, letters or journals”(306). An autobiographical fiction is
a type of novel which merges autobiographical and fictional techniques. The names and
places in the book are altered and the events in the author’s life is altered and recreated to
give the story a dramatic arc. “Autobiographical Fiction” allows the writer to use her fictional

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license. The elements used in creating a compelling text are drama, conflict, dialogue, scene
and descriptive detail. The writer also identifies special moments. The plot moves forward by
the writer exploring all the important moments in their life and this is done through
reflections/thought-processes revolving around the book’s theme or focus. Roy in TGST
explores the tidbits of her life and the events and characters in the novel are comprised of
made up events and characters that are not necessarily but maybe based on her own life
experiences and self. Roy deconstructs the traditional notion of the autobiography. Instead of
celebrating her personal growth through her public achievements, she delimits the scope of
the characters and events as metaphors for her concerns. The protagonist Rahel, the mother
Ammu, the brother Estha, the father and the other characters are modeled after the author and
people she knew; they even do some of the things that these characters in real life have
actually done , yet the ratio of truth to fiction is rather small.
Roy’s experiences inform her fiction. She is a writer with vivid imagination who
transforms moments in her memory into an entire new world of fictional moments inside the
novel. She describes Ammu as being a young girl caught in the traps of a confused
adolescence subject to gender discrimination inside a Syrian Christian patriarchal family:
‘Pappachi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl, so Ammu
had no choice but to leave Delhi and move with them. ... Since her father did not have enough
money to raise a suitable dowry no proposals came Ammu’s way’ (TGST 38). Then she goes
on describing Ammu’s desperation and consequent flight to Calcutta to spend the summer
with a distant aunt. Ammu meets her ‘future husband’ at a wedding reception that she attends
with the aunt. The ‘future husband’ is from a family who were ‘once-wealthy zamindars’ (39)
and had ‘migrated to Calcutta from East Bengal after partition’ (39). Ammu was not in love
with the man; she had weighed the odds and chosen the man over her present condition as a

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better option. Talking to Neyare Ali of TNN Roy’s mother, Mary Roy confesses that part of
this is true albeit a little exaggerated. She admits: ‘"I met my husband [Ranjit Roy] through
his elder brother . . . who was also working at Metal Box, a reputed company in Kolkata. I
worked as a secretary there. I was not in love with my husband. I married him to escape my
fate in my own community. My family was not too concerned as for them it meant a marriage
without dowry. Ranjit came from an aristocratic zamindar family”’ (Ali TNN July 14, 2002).
Before her marriage Mary Roy had been working as a secretary in a reputed company
whereas, Ammu in TGST had come to stay with an aunt; Arundhati’s father hailed from an
aristocratic zamindar family while Ammu’s husband’s family were ‘once-wealthy
zamindars’. The drama and the descriptive details of Ammu’s marriage day and that of her
father-in-law are absolutely fictionalized moments which further the plot but have hardly
much to do with Roy’s real life story. The father-in-law is a fine caricature of the decadent
Bengali gentry, who boasts of a ‘Boxing Blue from Cambridge(39)’ but drives away with all
the wedding gifts and jewellery of his newlywed son and daughter-in-law in the very
‘custom-painted, powder-pink Fiat (39)’ that he had gifted them. Ammu’s husband has been
described as a violent alcoholic who assaulted her when she did not agree to sleep with his
Boss to get him a transfer. The scene of domestic violence has been graphically and
dramatically portrayed:
Suddenly he lunged at her, grabbed her hair, punched her hair and then passed out
from the effort. . . . He apologized abjectly for the violence, but immediately began to
badger her about helping with his transfer. This fell into a pattern. Drunken violence
followed by post-drunken badgering. 42.

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This fictional moment is very different from the real. In fact Mary Roy states that although
her husband’s alcoholism came “as a rude shock to me. . . I must admit that he never
assaulted me. ... There has been no bitterness between us” (Ali TNN).
Linda Anderson in Autobiography discusses Derrida’s analysis of Freud’s fort-da, the
famous scene in Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud’s grandson Ernst is playing with
a reel. In the scene he keeps throwing it away constantly saying fort (there) and recovering it
thereafter, saying da (here). With the help of the reel Ernst is recalling his mother while
performing the fort-da. “According to Derrida, Freud is doing with his text what Ernst is
doing with his reel: he is recalling himself, just as Ernst is, but through a substitutive process-
a supplementary operation” (79). Anderson points out that Derrida sees autobiography as
deconstructing its supposed rational or theoretical basis. He sees it as ‘the unwitting
replication by the text of the process it is trying, rationally to understand’ (79). Roy’s
portrayal of Ammu’s father-in-law and husband in such unfavourable light falls in line with
Derrida’s analyses of Freud’s story. Roy’s mother had got separated from her husband when
Roy was only two years old. The frozen questions of a troubled childhood surface in the
novel. Roy deconstructs the rational and the true in caricaturing and exaggerating vice of both
the father and the grandfather, ‘trying rationally to understand’ the process of desertion and
hurt. In his discussion in The ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation,
Derrida sees autobiography in a different light. He does not assign it the meaning it
traditionally has as a genre with a history and recognizable form and conventions; rather, he
looks at autobiography as operating in a different way in a completely new space( 45).
Arundhati Roy problematizes autobiography that should be a chronology of empirical facts as
they apply to her life. Though the locale of the novel and the genealogy of the twins, Rahel
and Estha, are similar to those in the life of the writer yet they are restructured and

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reconstituted in the novel. TGST appears as a fictional work as it does not overtly wear the
proper noun signature of the writer .
Ammu, who is modeled upon Roy’s own mother, becomes a metaphor bodying forth
her concerns about discrimination in the levels of gender, class and caste. Derrida in
discussing Nietzsche’s autobiography has spoken about his mother, who he thinks is
fundamental but also anonymous.
She gives rise to all the figures by losing herself in the background of the scene like
an anonymous persona. Everything comes back to her, beginning with life; everything
addresses and destines itself to her. She survives on the condition of remaining at
bottom. Derrida 38.
In a similar vein Arundhati Roy positions the mother in TGST. Her mother becomes a
metaphor. The real Mary Roy is lost in the background like an anonymous persona, while
Ammu emerges. The first chapter, ‘Paradise Pickles and Preserves’, takes the reader to a
police station, where a common woman’s plight in the face of intimidation is dramatically
depicted. Ammu is subjected to harassment from the Police Inspector that leaves her insulted,
frustrated, broken and silent. Roy’s simple description of the scene at Kottayam police station
dramatizes the fictional moment and becomes a pointer to the atrocities faced by a woman in
a police station.
Inspector Thomas Matthew’s moustaches bustled like the friendly Air India
Maharajah’s, but his eyes were sly and greedy. … He stared at Ammu’s breasts as he
spoke. He said the police knew all needed to know and that the Kottayam police
didn’t take statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children. … Inspector
Thomas Matthew came around his desk and approached Ammu with his baton.

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‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d go home quietly.’ Then he tapped her breasts with his
baton. Gently. Tap,tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing
out the ones that he wanted packed and delivered. Inspector Thomas Matthew seemed
to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn’t. Policemen have that instinct.
8.
The incident instilled fear into the two children, Estha and Rahel, who were witness to the
scene. Their mother was crying and they understood something bad had happened but could
not understand what. For them fear seemed ‘real’. In his Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser says
that a conceptual reader, designated as “implied reader,” is generated when “we are to
understand the effects caused and responses elicited by literary work” (30). The “implied
reader” is born out of a text as an essential component to detect “all those predispositions
necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect” (30).
Roy intended her text to exercise an effect on the reader and elicit responses to her
literary work. Hence, she designed her fictional moments to extend from autobiographical
moments as a predisposition necessary for TGST to have its impact. She had been raised by
her mother, a strong-willed, temperamental woman, who repeatedly violated the social
conventions of her conservative Syrian Christian community in Kerala’s Kottayam District.
First, she entered into a love marriage with a Bengali Hindu, Ranjit Roy. Then she divorced
him and returned to her native village of Doty, in Kerala, with two very young children. It
was the early 1960s, and in the tight-knit, family-oriented Syrian Christian society, the
mother’s transgressions marked out her children. “I grew up in a very frightening situation,”
Roy tells Amy Kazmin in an interview,

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“My brother and I were not accepted as members of that community … I was on the
edge. It was like ‘nobody’s gonna marry you’. None of the assurances that normal
families, and normal communities, offer their children was available to us. So there
was always that questioning, that instinct to see things from the point of view of the
most vulnerable.
“I was not indoctrinated the way normal Indian women are,” she adds. “Nobody had
time to indoctrinate me. There was a direct relationship with the world; it was not
mediated by any protection.” Ft.com.
She sees her predicament as not unique, but something that is faced by many unprivileged
people in India. To create the desired effect on the readers, she brings out the gender bias
inside the family. On the one hand, in the novel, Ammu and her little children are constantly
berated for Ammu’s divorce and return. Ammu is violently thrown out of the family for her
illicit relationship with Velutha, the untouchable labourer. She is stripped off her children and
left to die alone and sick in terrible circumstances in a lodge. The sweeper found her in the
morning (TGST 162). On the other, the son of the same family Chako is pampered by the
mother. Chako too had divorced his English wife, left his daughter with the ex-wife and
returned home. The mother, Mammachi, is full of love and sympathy for Chako. She and the
entire family turn a blind eye to his exploits with the untouchable women working in the
Pickle factory. In fact, he is even given a room with a separate entrance so that his exploits,
his “Needs’” (169), do not disturb the family. Mammachi “secretly slipped them money to
keep them happy… The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee clarified
things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings” (169).

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Absence of a similar treatment of a daughter underlines the gendered identity of a
woman in society. Linda Anderson points out this difference saying, “‘Difference’ is the term
that is used to replace the notion of gendered identity as something innate, drawing attention
instead to how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are meanings produced within and through
language. Since language is ‘phallocentric’, that is, it subsumes the feminine into a masculine
‘universal’, women’s difference is produced in terms of an absence or gap within language,
which can also be used as a subversive space” (87). Arundhati Roy uses her subjects to
project ‘difference’ and thereby subverts accepted universals. Charges of anti-Communism
were leveled against Roy because of her portrayal of the Communist characters; the Chief
Minister of Kerala claimed that this, and not the book's literary merit, was the reason for its
popularity in the West. In addition, Roy faced charges of obscenity and demands that the
final chapter of the book be removed because of its sexual content. Roy attributed these
hostile reactions not to the "eroticism (which is mild) but rather to the book's explicit
treatment of the role of the untouchables in India... The abhorrence was thus as much political
as it was moral, and proves that fifty years after Gandhi coined the term Harijan ('children of
God') the Hindu caste system is still an important issue"( Smyrl ). It has been rightly
observed by Anderson that, “Autobiograhy has been one of the most important sites of
feminist debate precisely because it demonstrates that there are many different ways of
writing the subject” (87). Roy in TGST, replays the problem of the subject in an experimental
manner. She extends the autobiographical subject into a fictional one; thereby making TGST
an autobiographical fiction.
References

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Ali, Neyare. “There is Something About Mary.” TNN. July 14,2002.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/stoi/Theres-something-about-
Mary/articleshow/15871684.cms Web. Accessed: 26.12.2013
Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Iser, W. The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Print.
Kazmin, Amy. Arundhati Roy. June 3, 2011. 5:15 pm. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1ed76814-
8bf2-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#axzz2oYRYeVwj Web. Accessed : 26.12.2013
Rak, Julie. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.”
Genre. XXXVI Fall/Winter 2004. 305-326. Print.
Roy, Arundhati. “I Had Two Options – Writing or Madness”. Interview by Urvashi Butalia.
Outlook India.com 09 April 1997. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?203329. Web.
Accessed: 27.12.2013
… … The God of Small Things. New Delhi : Indian Ink, 1997. Print.
Smith, S and J, Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life
Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.
Smyrl, Becky. Biography of Arundhati Roy.
http://www.haverford.edu/english/engl277b/Contexts/Arundhati_Roy.htm Web. Accessed :
29.12.2013.

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