Place is text: Representing the architecture of landscape, the human and non-human in Arundhati Roy’s prose

Abstract

Abstract In a recent interview, writer and activist Arundhati Roy has proposed the definition of ‘Delhi as a novel’ to pinpoint the cultural variety, ramification, and dynamism of the Indian capital city. Rather than being a mere literary embellishment, this type of conceptualization reveals the author’s attitude towards the environment, in its geographical, human, and non-human shapes, as important segments and participants of the wide biosphere. In Roy’s prose, in fact, the linguistic depiction of places as diverse as the teeming streets of Delhi, the flourishing fields of Kerala, and the impervious valleys of Kashmir not only supports the creation of meaning in the narrative, but also permits foreground-loaded questions of identity and belonging, particularly with regard to liminal subjects such as women, hijras (i.e. transgender persons) and migrants. Adopting the perspective of ecostylistics, an interdisciplinary domain that borrows and integrates ideas, frameworks, and methods from stylistics and ecocriticism, this article intends to investigate (1) some of the linguistic features of Roy’s postcolonial narratives, focusing on the strategic ‘architecture’ of the text-worlds that center around the environment, and (2) the power of the language to index social questions of precarity. The analysis considers extracts from Roy’s fictional and non-fictional texts, in particular her novels The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and applies various critical tools. The main findings of the investigation exhibit the author’s ecological view and political beliefs that emerge in devices like point of view, figurative language, and defamiliarization, and that trigger a broader view of the environment, one in which the relation between the human and the non-human is complementary rather than competitive.