Walcotts Collected Poems and Roys The God of Small Things :: comparison compare contrast essays

Post-Colonial and Post-Modernist View of Walcott's Collected Poems and Roy's The God of Small Things      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   "Language was not so much a distinguishing sign of a soul or spirituality, which animals do not possess, as a social practice which enhanced survival of the species"-Nietzche. Nietzche reminded twentieth century intellectuals of the decisive role of language in the construction of human experience of 'reality'. With his 'perspectivism' and relativism, truth, whether artistic or scientific was seen as a social matter and a linguistic product, the displacement of one set of figures of speech by another, with knowledge the interrelations of signifiers in a field of experience made of prior interpretations. (Irving Howe, 80).    Thus in Walcott's poems and in Roy's 'The God of Small Things' modernism was further routed by inversion of ethical values as power tools for survival and exploitation, and of art as a veil over a reality describable only as wanton, godless procreation. This conception of a dynamic world of super changed energies of unimaginable force, often in violent conflict and ever-changing relations, came to resemble Freud's concept of id.    We observe, in their writings (Walcott and Roy) the apparently rational surface of consciousness hides a mass of tangled and conflicting desires, impulses and needs. The outer person is a mere papering-over of the cracks of a split and waring complex of selves driven by life and death instincts.    Walcott in his poem 'The Divided Child' writes,    There was your heaven ! The clear glaze of another life, a landscape locked in amber, the rare gleam. The dream of reason had produced its monster : a prodigy of the wrong age and colour. (Walcott 145).    According to him, language was not the transparent tool for the objective representation of a stable reality: ethics was not expressive of a discovered system of absolute values or religion other than a desire for parental protection throughout life.    He writes in his poem 'Lampfall,' And I'm elsewhere, far as I shall ever be from you whom I behold now, Dear family, dear friends, by this still glow The lantern's ring that the sea's Never extinguished Your voices curl in the shell of my ear. (Walcott 95).    When Roy was asked in an interview, 'What does it mean to be Indian?' she replied: 'Do we ask, 'What does it mean to be American or to be British?