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 graven image 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 intensify survival of the species-Nietzche. Nietzche reminded twentieth century intellectuals of the decisive role of language in the construction of human experience of globe. With his perspectivism and relativism, truth, whether artistic or scientific was seen as a social matter and a linguistic product, the displacement of whizz set of figures of speech by another(prenominal), with knowledge the interrelations of signifiers in a world of experience made of prior interpretations. (Irving Howe, 80). Thus in Walcotts poems and in Roys The God of Small Things modernism was further routed by inversion of ethical value as power tools for survival and exploitation, and of art as a blot out over a reality describable only as wanton, irreverent p rocreation. This conception of a dynamic world of super changed energies of unimaginable force, ofttimes 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 circle 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 deuce 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 dictatorial values or religion other than a desire for agnatic protection throughout life. He writes in his poem Lampfall, And Im elsewhere, far as I shall ever be from you whom I behold now, Dear family, upright friends, by this still glow The lanterns ring that the seas Never extinguished Your voices twist in the shell of my ear. (Walcott 95). When Roy was asked in an interview, What does it typify to be Indian? she replied Do we ask, What does it mean to be American or to be British?