WHAT IS A STORY GOOD FOR? SHELTER AND CRITIQUE IN ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

Abstract

The main claim of my study is that Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness establishes a mode of engaging with stories that is exhausted neither by representation nor by critique. By “representation,” I refer to the use of stories for the production and reinforcement of identities; by “critique,” I mean an expert stance that assumes its own perspective can access and understand reality and its constructions without personal involvement. Roy essentially blends identification and critical knowledge along a spectrum, where the specific life situation determines how a story is used. In the relationship between the story and its recipient, identification places the emphasis on the recipient, framing the story as a form of refuge or consolation. However, since the truth of the content becomes secondary in this case, the story may turn schematic. Critical reception, on the other hand, foregrounds the truth of the story, pushing the recipient’s needs into the background. In the novel, this kind of usage is mostly associated with fragmented texts that point precisely to the absence of a responsible subject. I relate this mode of storytelling to the concept of use as outlined in Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies which exceeds relations of possession and unsettles the boundary between subject and object.