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

Post-Colonial and Post-Modernist View of Walcotts Collected Poems and Roys The God of Small Things 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 20th 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 depend 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). olibanum in Walcotts verses and in Roys 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 unacceptable force, often in violent conflict and ever-changing relations, came to resemble Freuds concept of id. We observe, in their writings (Walcott and Roy) the apparently rational surface of consciousness hides a spate 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 portent 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 communicative of a discovered system of absolute values or religion other than a desire for parental protection throughout life. He writes in his poem Lampfal l, And Im elsewhere, far as I shall ever be from you whom I behold now, Dear family, dear friends, by this still glow The lanterns ring that the seas 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?