Globalisation, Labour, Narrative and Representation in Arundhati Roy, Monica Ali and Kiran Desai

Abstract

This chapter begins with a delineation of author and activist Arundhati Roy’s feminist, eco-critical analysis of the processes and politics of globalisation, especially in India, in her journalism and in her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997). One of the key dissident voices of South Asia, Roy has likened her method in both her fiction and non-fiction to ‘joining the dots’ between the immense social forces that affect the small events and individual realities of people’s lives. Her concern with the impact of neocolonialism, globalisation, patriarchy, inequality and environmental degradation on vulnerable peoples has influenced many of the writers discussed in this book. This chapter focuses on how Monica Ali’s novels Brick Lane (2003) and In the Kitchen (2009) and Desai’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) revisit and extend Roy’s engagement with issues of globalisation and the marginalised. It argues that Desai’s non-linear, elaborately structured narrative shares a related intervention to stretch the possibilities of realist fiction to capture the plight of those disenfranchised by the economic operations of globalisation. As Desai observes, ‘In a world obsessed with national boundaries and belonging, as a novelist working with a form traditionally obsessed with place, it was a journey to come to realise that the less structured, the multiple may be a possible location for fiction, perhaps a more valid ethical location’. In another interview she clarifies further, ‘as I wrote I became aware of the rich novelistic moments that come from many stories overlapping, from this moral ambiguity, and from the utter uselessness of the flag’. Desai seems to suggest that the ethical work of the novelist is to pay attention to the global. Moreover, if the narrative presentation of the problems of globalisation is not a transparent rendering of reality, her satiric and poetic prose confirms that realism is not her standard. If Desai’s interrogation of realism has an ethical component, this chapter asks, how does this relate to Monica Ali’s slow-paced, broadly realist Bildungsroman Brick Lane (2003) and her third novel In the Kitchen (2009), which share this new consciousness of the relations between subalterns, labour and the workings of global capital and the increased polarisation between the global South and North? Roy and Desai’s non-linear narratives, which extend the realist form, and Ali’s broadly realist novels need to be considered in relation to recent discussions about realism and postcolonial fiction, notably, the tendency in some readers to ignore aesthetics and take realist postcolonial fiction as a form of anthropological report. Complicating the realist form is thus a means of challenging the burden of representation. Moreover, all three writers reflect and shape recent critical conversations on reading as empathy or as exemplifying empathy. In his insightful essay ‘Ethnicity, Authenticity and Empathy in the Realist Novel and Its Alternatives’, Dave Gunning maps out the critical issues in relation to reading and the problem of empathy. He begins by tracing black British writer Caryl Phillips’ sustained engagement with the difficulty of relating to migrants in his novel A Distant Shore (2003). He identifies Philips’ focus on new migrants from eastern and southern Europe from the mid-1990s in his novel In the Falling Snow (2009) as emblematic of the way these migrants have become the markers of difference within the British nation and in contemporary British fiction. In different ways, all three writers dramatise this difficulty of connection between people distinct from each other, alongside the imperative need to perform an act of imaginative empathy with distant others, whether it be the migrant labourer, asylum seeker, refugee or those outside one’s own class/caste background. Thus, as critics have suggested, Roy’s most important interventions include her abandoning of a detached bourgeois mode of perception and apprehension, a bilingual sensibility where English is not taken for granted as a first language and the opening up of the language of the elite to the life-worlds of the marginalised in The God of Small Things.