Novelizing Non-Fiction: Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and the Critical Realism of Global Anglophone Literature

Abstract

This essay examines Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades (2011), a reportage about Maoist guerrillas engaged in an armed struggle against the Indian state, as a contemporary instance of critical realism. Drawing on theorizations of the novel and realism by Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, I argue Roy’s reportage incorporates formal elements and techniques of the novel as well as a realist aesthetic to adapt the genre to depict adequately the life-worlds of the people from central India’s “Maoist heartland”, as they are experienced under conditions of contemporary globalization. The essay illuminates, in particular, Roy’s use of the novel’s dialogic structure, narrative discourse, and refracted focalization to fashion a realist aesthetic that seeks to map cognitively the connections between the global and the local. In so doing, Roy enacts what I call a “novelization of non-fiction” that represents a formal and aesthetic response to the historical pressures of globalization. This gestures towards a broader development in global anglophone literature: the return to a newly critical realism. Developing an understanding of realism in the context of global anglophone literature, the essay thus seeks to globalize our understanding of that aesthetic mode while underscoring its importance in depicting our contemporary moment. Furthermore, it brings a critical focus on Roy’s non-fictional writings, which have received much less scholarly attention than her two novels.