A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated:

Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie

Laura Karttunen

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume

6, Number 2, June 2008, pp. 419-441 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/pan.0.0015

For additional information about this article

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A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated:

Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie
Laura Karttunen
University of Tampere

In his 1988 article The Disnarrated, Gerald Prince formulated a new

narrative category that covers all the events that do not happen but,
nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the
narrative text (2). According to Prince, the disnarrated is constituted by
terms, phrases, and passages that consider what does not happen, and it
can involve a characters unrealized imaginings such as crushed hopes or
false calculations, a turn that the narrative does not take, or a narrative
strategy that the narrator does not adopt. It thus forces the reader to consider alternative possibilities: what could have taken place, how things
could have been.
According to Prince, the disnarrated is related to tellability. It suggests
that a narrative is worth telling because it could have been otherwise and
usually is otherwise. When the disnarrated concerns the narrating, it implies that the narrative is more interesting because it follows a different
narrative strategy. In the latter case, as Prince points out, the disnarrated
underscores the realities of representation rather than the representation
of realities (5). Despite this metarepresentational aspect, the disnarrated
as such is not radically anti-illusionistic it appears in realist as well as
postmodern fiction.
Prince based his theory of the disnarrated on sources from both literary studies and studies in natural narratives. In the latter field, William
Labov (37071) had recognized that narratives of personal experience
contain an evaluative section that answers the question why this story
is told. Labov regards an event as reportable if it involves violation of
an expected rule of behavior; if it is strange, uncommon, or unusual.
He treats negatives as comparators, devices that draw upon a cognitive
background considerably richer than the set of events which were observed. They provide a way of evaluating events by placing them against
the background of other events which might have happened (381).
I believe that negatives can have two functions. Either they name the
norm against which a particular event stands out: The queen wasnt
PARTIAL ANSWERS 6/2: 419441 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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wearing a hat or they hint at hypothetical and unrealized turns of events,

thus making the narrative richer: In the end, the plane didnt crash (but
could have). Both cases involve a sense of what is possible or probable
in the world. In the former case the event is reportable, because it is
exceptional; in the latter, an airplane flight that ended well (a normative
rather than an exceptional situation) is rendered tellable by considering
the non-normative possibility of the plane crashing. For obvious reasons,
literary scholars have been occupied primarily with the latter,1 the fiction-making aspect. What interests me here, though, is the former aspect
world-making, which is mentioned by Prince, too:
[The disnarrated] insists upon the ability to conceive and manipulate hypothetical worlds or states of affairs and the freedom to reject various
models of intelligibility, of coherence and significance, various norms,
conventions or codes for world- and fiction-making. (6)

By pointing to unrealized lines of development or rejecting a social

or literary norm or convention, the disnarrated makes these norms and
conventions visible. Princes formulation this couldve happened but
didnt (3) could in many cases be rephrased as this shouldve happened
but didnt. Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps point out that while very young
children recount routine, scripted events, they soon learn to tell about
exceptional events involving violations of social expectations. Ochs and
Capps conclude that narration helps solidify socio-culturally sanctioned
templates for living in the world (7879). By narrating, people clarify
or reinforce their own and others expectations of what should and could
happen in life (154). The disnarrated brings into focus the social norm
that a person has failed to live up to, or the Bakhtinian other voice that a
text responds to. This makes it a valuable analytical category for postcolonial and feminist criticism which sees the discursive context of a particular work as worth investigating in its own right. Edward Said, among
others, argues that (post)colonial literature should be read metonymically
(contrapuntally), with an eye on the social and cultural context, rather
than metaphorically (univocally), in the context of the literary canon.
In this paper I explore how explicit denials direct the readers attention to the social norm or convention that is being discounted. I attempt to
integrate the disnarrated with Bakhtinian sociostylistics, also taking into
account the pragmatic functions of negatives. I have chosen three bicul1

A wonderfully illustrative visual representation of what constitutes a tellable story can

be found in Marie-Laure Ryan 1991: 160.

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A SOCIOSTYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON NEGATIVES AND THE DISNARRATED 421

tural literary texts that highlight various aspects of negatives. I juxtapose

the functions of negatives in non-literary texts and in Salman Rusdhdies
Shame; I then relate negatives and the disnarrated to the old problem of
the relationship between narrators and focalizers. For the latter purpose
my test case is a short-story by Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri that is
set in India but betrays, by its lexical choices, a problematic outsider
perspective. Finally, I use Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things a
trauma fiction and a modern masterpiece to show how the disnarrated
allows authors not only to react to specific social expectations but also to
engineer and disappoint those of the reader.

Negatives among Linguistic Surface Representations of the Disnarrated

There are different degrees of explicitness when it comes to representing
the disnarrated. Linguistic devices for expressing unactualized possibilities include, in addition to negatives, counterfactuals such as I wish we
had won the game and counterfactual conditionals such as If we had
won, we would be satisfied. There are also ways of conveying the unrealized dreams or hallucinations of characters that do not involve a specific
set of linguistic markers. By focusing exclusively on negative constructions, I am thus attending to just a small portion of the wide spectrum
of phenomena covered by the term the disnarrated.2 Princes seminal
article does not deal with linguistic surface phenomena such as negatives
as much as it does with the unrealized, hypothetical events themselves.
Subsequent commentators, such as Marie-Laure Ryan (1995) and Robyn
Warhol (2005), likewise concentrate on questions of plot. By contrast,
I examine negatives as primarily responding to other discourses rather
than describing an object, as evaluating rather than narrating an event.
Like Harold F. Mosher Jr. (1993), who discusses mostly cases of the disnarrated that are not brought up explicitly but that can be inferred from
the text (Joyces Eveline could have left but did not; the boy in Araby
does not buy what he intends) and voices qualms about whether such implicit forms of non-happening fit into Princes scheme, I raise the question whether negatives explicit forms of non-happening qualify
as disnarration. Should the two forms of expressing non-happening be
treated as two separate categories or as two sides of the same coin? The
2

As Laura Hidalgo Downings 2003 article shows, negatives, being textually marked by
words such as no and not or by affixes, can be easily retrieved from an electronic corpus,
which makes it easy to gather a set of representative texts for further analysis.

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hypothetical and negative mode mentioned in Princes definition should

perhaps be separated analytically for, as I shall show, negatives are emphatically interdiscursive. And yet both can lead the reader to imagine an
alternative state of affairs or course of events.
Prince aligns his new concept with what he calls narrative pragmatics (7), arguing that the interpretative context of a narrative could be
considered part of its text. He specifically refers to the ground-breaking
work of feminist narratologists Susan Sniader Lanser and Robyn Warhol.
While in Fictions of Authority (1992) Lanser does not mention Prince or
the term disnarrated, she does describe the functions that negatives can
serve in fiction. She discusses a letter by an unhappy bride that contains
three voices. The surface text praises marriage, and in the hidden one a
bride laments her unhappy marriage. But the surface text itself is doublevoiced, for by listing the cruelties that this particular brides husband is
not guilty of, it paints an unfavorable picture of marriage itself: In its negations, the surface letter . . . describes as normative the kind of marriage
the writer claims to have escaped; each statement about the speakers
good fortune implies a norm in which brides repent their marriages, husbands are monstrous, and women are playthings or slaves (12). It is
worth noting that here it is the author herself who creates the conceptual
backcloth (misery of married life) by means of negatives, and this view
stands in stark contrast to the dominant ideology of the time. Thus negatives can do more than just reflect their historical context; they can surreptitiously evoke contexts that would be unmentionable otherwise.

Negation in Natural Language: Refuting an Expectation or Claim

Mikhail Bakhtin believed that for every utterance there must be a question to which it represents an answer. Stylistics, in his opinion, should
study words not merely in the system of language or in the context of a
single literary text but in the entire discursive sphere. Bakhtin advocated a
pragmatic, contextual approach to both literary and non-literary texts that
would address [t]he orientation of the word among words, the various
perceptions of the other persons word and the various means of reacting
to it (202).3 Negatives and emphatic affirmatives are prime examples of
3
Following in Bakhtins footsteps, David Herman (19495) has envisioned a new sociological stylistics that pools together the resources of sociolinguistic, discourse-analytic
as well as literary and narratological research on style. Ansgar Nnning (2004) has likewise
called for a context-sensitive approach to narrative, an applied cultural narratology that

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A SOCIOSTYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON NEGATIVES AND THE DISNARRATED 423

such dialogicity in language. A negative sentence requires an appropriate

discursive context in order to be understood. Without such a context, it is
ambiguous and therefore uninformative, or downright nonsensical. Negatives only make sense if an explicit (co-textual) or implicit (contextual)
expectation or claim is being refuted that is, if the speaker has reason
to suspect the listener of holding a particular belief.4 Such expectations
may arise, according to Talmy Givn (103), from a previous discussion,
life experience, and general knowledge of the world or its reflection in
dictionary knowledge. These expectations, which may be termed frame
knowledge, are culture specific.
Due to the vagueness of negatives, new information is usually presented in the affirmative. However, it is not always possible to affirm
what has happened. To take a recent example, a member of the Finnish
Parliament was involved in a car accident. He lost control of his vehicle
for reasons that could not be specified because he lost consciousness. His
representative appeared on TV and stated that the MP was not using his
cell phone and that he probably did not fall asleep while driving as he had
had enough rest. While the court came to the conclusion that the collapse
was due to some unexplained health reason, we still do not know for
certain what happened. Since the representative could not narrate in the
indicative the events leading to the accident, he had to orient his words to
the words of others, to the questions and expectations of the reporter and
the public. Since negative sentences require appropriate contexts in order
to be processed with ease, in order to communicate successfully he had
to have a good idea of the expectations and prejudices of the public concerning politicians and cars. Had he stressed that the male candidate was
not applying make-up while driving, this context would have been lacking, and the statement would have had a defamiliarizing effect. It would
have been a denial out of the blue, and the scenario is so unlikely that it
would have practically incriminated the MP. As far as I can remember,
the representative did not say He was not driving under the influence,
even though this sentence is routinely included in reports of traffic ac-

would bridge the gap between textual formalism and historical contextualism and take into
account the ideological implications of narratives. My research on Indian fiction falls within
that category.
4
I have benefited greatly from Sakari Katajamkis (2000, 2002) insightful and thoroughly documented articles on negatives in language and literature, especially poetry, that
take pragmatic linguistics as their starting point. Building on the same pragmatic framework,
I focus on narratological issues and bicultural texts.

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cidents. To even mention alcohol might lead the public to associate the
MP with drunk driving.
By repeating the stereotypical assumption, denials and modifications
may, paradoxically, end up perpetuating it.5 Consequently, once a particular discourse has taken root, it is all but impossible to uproot it. Consider the following description of a tourist guidance service for gays:
The service has been set up by entrepreneur Ilkka Veistrm, who stresses
that the idea is definitely not to create an escort service. It is a professional
guidance service for gay tourists. The firm will supply the guides with a
two-day training course and pay for their work. Also the clients who book
a guide will be given the rules, with emphasis on normal tourist guidance
not on sex.6

The entrepreneur denies that the service has anything to do with prostitution. This is an example of language that cringes in the presence
or the anticipation of someone elses word, reply, objection (Bakhtin
196). That is, the speaker is reacting to a prejudice. The last sentence,
which is not explicitly attributed to the interviewee, reiterates that the
service is not about sex. It is easy to see where the denials are coming
from. The interviewee or the reporter suspects the audience of having the
preconception that being gay is first and foremost about sex rather than,
say, companionship and reacts to it by using negatives. Since the text
is clearly obsessed with this cultural discourse oriented to anothers
word rather than to the referential object it ceases to be an affirmative description of the tourist guidance service. On the one hand, readers
who subscribe to the stereotype of hypersexual gay people may not see
anything peculiar about the article; it merely reinforces the stereotype.
On the other hand, if a reader does not accept this stereotype, the shared
context is lacking and the negatives seem to come out of the blue. In the
latter case, the denials may seem so overt as to produce a defamiliarizing
or even comical effect, thereby exposing the artificiality of this cultural
discourse. Thus, while denials like these may perpetuate cultural myths,
they also make them visible: a negative construction makes explicit the
cultural discourse that is usually taken for granted, allowing people to
disagree with it and dispute it.

See Vedentams article where the findings on the processing of negatives presented in
Mayo et al. are used to explain the spread and persistence of political and social myths.
6
Special Guides. Here and below the italics are mine.

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Negatives and the Disnarrated in Literature

As in the above cases, negatives in literature clue us in on the social norms
of the texts setting. In Rushdies Shame, for instance, Raza is thought
highly of by the women of his family because he was a good man who
did not beat his wife (76). But in fiction, negatives are sometimes used
not innocently but self-consciously, as when Rushdie continues: This
definition of goodness alarmed Bilqus, to whom it had never occurred
that she might be beaten (ibid). Thus, while negatives may convey useful knowledge of a particular society, they may also be misleading.
Moreover, negatives clue us in on the literary norms of the society
or of a particular historical genre. Warhol (226) demonstrates this with
examples from Victorian literature: events and conclusions that were unacceptable or, to use her term, paranarratable at the time do however
surface in passages presented in a hypothetical mode. Lanser (137) draws
attention to the negatives in Austens Northanger Abbey that differentiate
the Morland family from the heroic families of fictional fantasy and
thereby point to the generic norm.
Third, the negative mode is useful for illustrating a focalizing agents
norms and what s/he expects of others. The disnarrated also can clue us
in on the attitudes of the narrator. When, for instance, the narrator of The
God of Small Things states that there is no cure for the traumatized twins
condition, the implicit statement is that there should be one.
Negatives and the disnarrated are an important resource in postcolonial and bicultural texts. Postcolonial literature is usually defined in
terms of its political function. It writes back to the imperial center and
challenges the norms and conventions of Anglo-American (literary) texts
in an attempt at cultural decolonization (see Tiffin). In reacting to previous texts (This is what is usually written whether or not it happened like
this) and imagining alternative histories (what could have been), postcolonial literature involves the disnarrated almost by definition. Since these
texts often address a dual or multiple audience, postcolonial authors are
often in a position of having to read and translate their own culture for a
foreign readership. Introducing chunks of cultural background information into a book can hamper the flow of the narrative, whereas negatives
are convenient for conveying presuppositional information as in the
following sentence from The God of Small Things: He didnt know that
in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of
despair competed for primacy (19). This is a common strategy of establishing facts as given without actually asserting them, and it makes little

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difference whether the presuppositional information is embedded in an

affirmative or negative statement (cf. Chatman 1978: 210).
A negative has the capacity to communicate the sensus communis; it
subtly informs people of the beliefs they are supposed to hold and the expectations they are supposed to have of particular events and of particular
kinds of people. When, after a bridge collapse, one news report after another repeats that nothing points to terrorism, all audience members are
asked to entertain the possibility of a terrorist attack even if this would
not occur to them spontaneously. This way every story about an accident
can be made to be about terrorism even in the absence of all evidence. In
a similar way, presupposition can be exploited in fiction to establish facts
that defy real-world parameters. In Roys novel, as a mother is counting her new-born twins fingers and toes, the narrator states: She didnt
notice the single siamese soul (41). Here the negative is essential to preserving the illusion of realism, and it could be replaced by didnt think
about or did not say anything about the siamese soul.
Rushdie makes deft use of this feature of negatives in Shame. The
narrator recounts an incident where a man called Sindbal Mengal makes
kissing noises at Bilqus, a married woman. A little later, the story is
picked up again: Every night, leaving her child in the care of a locally
hired ayah, Bilqus sat in the brand-new cinema called Mengal Mahal.
But Q was a small town; eyes saw things, even in the dark... (100).
The ellipsis here is a sign of the unnarrated, the antithesis of the disnarrated it marks one of the passages that explicitly do not tell what
is supposed to have happened, foregrounding the narrators refusal to
narrate (Warhol 221). The ellipsis also represents a gap for the reader
to fill in, to imagine the unnarrated reality, Mengal and Bilquss affair.
In a roundabout way Rushdies narrator suggests that Bilquss husband Raza murdered Mengal and that her baby was fathered by the latter. Thereafter, Mengal repeatedly pops up in the book, nearly always
in the negative mode, in sentences stating what was not said: The
name of Mengal was never mentioned between them, not even when
the town was buzzing with the murder story (103); A second baby
was born, six weeks early, but Raza has uttered no word of suspicion
(111); Some things did not get talked about. Nobody mentioned a fatmouthed boy called Sindbad Mengal, or speculated on the parentage of
the young Hyder girl (119); And it is possible that Raza was delighted
to be able to get rid of Good News, because she had developed, as she
grew, something of the full-mouthed insouciance of the late Sindbad
Mengal (154); The ghost of Sindbad Mengal was not mentioned, but

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O, he was there all right (166). By thus keeping Mengal on the agenda,
the narrator reinforces the suggestion of the adulterous affair. The effect
on the reader would not differ significantly were it produced by a similar
sequence of narrated events (Raza wondered about the early delivery
or The party guests speculated about Mengal and the Hyder girl), but
the negatives render the ontological status of the affair ambiguous: either
it exists and is not mentioned despite the fact that it occupies the minds
of the characters, or it is non-existent and therefore not mentioned. Even
in the single affirmative sentence above, the hypothetical status of the
event is signaled by it is possible, and the insistent, even taunting, tone
of the last sentence draws attention to the rhetorical tricks of the narrator. The individual sentences discussed consider what does not happen
(Mengal was not mentioned), and together they form a narrative (in the
readers mind) that covers events that either do or do not happen. This
raises questions about the scope of the term disnarrated whether it
is a discourse-level or story-level phenomenon and whether it applies
to events whose ontological status is ambiguous or exclusively to ones
where it is clearly negative. Brian Richardson (2001) takes up these issues in his article on what he terms denarration, a narrative negation that
denies or erases aspects of the narrative that had been presented as given:
in narratives involving denarration, there will not be much recoverable
story, only the discourse, which effectively collapses the separation of
the two. Strictly speaking, since Rushdie never narrates the illicit affair
and so need not denarrate it either, Richardsons term would not quite
apply here. The narration is hypothetical from the start. Gary Saul Morson writes of a similar strategy in Dostoevsky: By depriving any version
of undeniable actuality, Dostoevsky reveals the field itself. The sideshadows crowd out the actual event. Indeed, nothing may have happened, in
which case the sideshadows themselves are all there is (122). Instead
of confidently narrating one course of events as actual, Rushdie presents
the field of hypotheticals, making the reader conscious of the maneuvers
involved in producing or emplotting the actual. Leaving ontology for the
sake of pragmatics, I suggest that Rushdies negative sentences discussed
above may serve to standardize the responses of a very heterogeneous
readership. By reporting what the local gossips are saying and then making the reader a party to their speculation, Rushdie can convey to the
reader (e.g., a European reader) not just the events but the way they are
to be read.

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Are Negatives a Matter of Perception or Narration?

Since the camera eye captures only things that are present, negatives
can only appear once a filmed scene is verbalized. Conversely, once
verbalized, a negative must be attributable to a narrative agent. Since it
entails an evaluation and a focus, it cannot be objective. Seymour Chatman finds that it is often impossible to assign negatives unequivocally to
one particular agents perception or cognition, impossible to determine
who provides the perceptual filter (2001: 220). He explicitly mentions
not thinking7 and not perceiving but actually discusses a sentence in
Hemingways Cat in the Rain that states what a character is not doing: George was not listening to his wife. Chatman concludes that the
negative could be tied to either the husband or the wifes experience of
the scene and that both of these blend with the narrators slant which,
he argues, is not slanted either way in this story. Prince (6) points out that
as the intrusive omniscient narrator lost its appeal and was substituted by
the external, camera point of view, the disnarrated became impossible.
The new aesthetic preferences ruled out evaluative commentary by the
narrator, even in as unintrusive a form as negatives. That the disnarrated
has survived and works well in Cat in the Rain is explained precisely
by the problematic filter status mentioned by Chatman. No aesthetic restrictions seem to apply to the use of the disnarrated with respect to the
story as long as it reflects a focalizing characters and not the narrators
expectations.
When trying to attribute the disnarrated to different narrative agents
characters and narrators it is useful to consider the place of negatives on the continuum from visual perception to verbal reporting. The
difficulty involved is illustrated nicely by this passage from Roys The
God of Small Things where the seven-year old Rahel is attending a fu7
For an interesting discussion of sentences that consider what a character did not think,
see Royle (98). Statements of what characters do not think or say have been regarded by
previous commentators (e.g. Chatman 1978: 225) as signs of omniscience or narratorial presence. Royle suggests that the tendency to dismiss representations of what a character does
not realize by appealing to the religious concept of omniscience derives from the critics discomfort with the idea of the unconscious. He himself prefers to think about such phenomena
in terms of telepathy. I tend to regard reports of what characters did not think as essentially
similar to other negative sentences: they either reflect a collective understanding of how
people should react in various situations or function as rhetorical tools. In Fitzgeralds This
Side of Paradise, for example, the narrator gives the reader an interpretative clue in the negative mode: During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk (106)
cf. the section on presuppositional information above.

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neral: The long candles on the altar were bent. The short ones werent
(4). The conventional way of describing this scene would be to mention
the long, bent candles only, even if it meant leaving the reader in the dark
as regards the presence of shorter candles on that same altar. Straight
candles are the norm or the ground against which the figure of the bent
candles stands out, rising above the threshold of reportability. The short
candles would fall below that threshold.
A more suitable alternative is to view the passage as reflecting the
childs idiosyncratic way of perceiving her surroundings, recording the
small and ordinary as well as the big and extraordinary things.8 If the
scene is experienced rather than reported, the criteria for reportability
do not come into play. The sentences could then be read as if they were
following the girls gaze as it focuses first on the bent candles and then
on the straight ones. The contrast thus registered would then be conveyed
by the negative (that is, verbalized by someone other than the child).
That we are dealing with an illusion of a childs perspective is clear from
the symmetry of the sentences: the echoing of the affirmative sentence
by the negative one is possible only if the former has been verbalized
said aloud or written down. The same is true of the passage where
Rahel witnesses a happy scene between her mother and uncle: Chacko
was so bursty. So very happy. Chacko didnt slap her. So she didnt slap
him back (131). By presenting not only what Rahel sees but what she
expects to see, Roy illustrates the (idiosyncratic) network of expectations
that orients an individuals perception.

Choosing Your Words with Care Perception is Not Universal

The structures of expectation that determine how a person perceives
events and objects are based on past experience and therefore dependent
on ones cultural background. Deborah Tannens ingenious 1993 study
shows that a persons expectations manifest themselves in the surface
linguistic structure of a narrative. The study involved showing the same
short film to American and Greek people and having them verbalize the
events in the film. Disappointment of expectations was often indicated by
8
I wish to thank Peggy Heller for raising the question of experience vs. reporting in
connection with this passage and all those who kindly commented on my paper at the 3rd
Tampere Conference on Narrative Knowing, Living, and Telling in June 2007. I am also
grateful to Matti Hyvrinen for referring me to studies on narratives of personal experience,
especially Tannen 1993.

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negatives (37). Tannen found that the two groups expectations concerning films, events, and objects in the world differed somewhat and that
omissions, for instance, highlighted cultural differences: whereas some
of the Greek informants mentioned only a passing man, all Americans
referred to him as a man with a goat. Tannen concludes that the fact that
a man has a goat is less remarkable to (less urban) Greek people and
therefore need not be mentioned specifically. Her article illustrates how
objects and events in the world are necessarily perceived from an angle.
In Jhumpa Lahiris short story Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the
narrator is not quite as objective as Hemingways narrators but rather
possesses her own angle of perception. Equipped with Tannens findings, I go against Chatmans claim that narrators cannot be focalizers;
I side with James Phelan who maintains that narrators can be focalizers
since a human narrator . . . cannot report a coherent sequence of events
without also revealing not just a set of attitudes (or slant) but also his or
her angle of perception (115). In a bicultural text like Lahiris, where
the cultural background of the narrator (who, we infer, is American) differs from that of a character (an Indian, Mr. Kapasi), the two angles of
perception may easily diverge.
In Lahiris story, Mr. Kapasi drives an Indian-American family to the
Konarak temple. During the drive he becomes infatuated with the mother.
The story begins as follows:
At the tea stall Mr. and Mrs. Das bickered about who should take Tina to
the toilet. Eventually Mrs. Das relented when Mr. Das pointed out that
he had given the girl her bath the night before. In the rearview mirror Mr.
Kapasi watched as Mrs. Das emerged slowly from his bulky white Ambassador, dragging her shaved, largely bare legs across the back seat. She did
not hold the little girls hand as they walked to the rest room. (43)

Negation is emphatically a feature of language: a camera-eye could not

capture what is here expressed through negation. The recording would
just show a mother and a child walking side by side, while the linguistic
medium allows or forces one to focus on the hands or on something in the
mood or relationship that not linking them represents. The built-in focus
of negatives can be explained by the fact that there is an infinite number
of non-events at a given time: naming just one of them implies a focus.
Expressing the negatives in the passage quoted in a filmic medium would
require a fair amount of maneuvering. It can be done, though, as testified by the iconic image from The Bicycle Thief (1948) where father and
son finally hold hands after having been shown to stand apart at several

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points in the film. This final image turns the earlier ones into negatives,
enabling one to describe them as father and son not holding hands. To
represent on film the negative sentence quoted above, there would have
to be at least one image of a mother and child holding hands. What the
film would still not capture is the evaluative aspect of the negative sentence. The sentence does not just state that hand-holding is what could
have happened and often does, but that it should have happened. There
is a theme developing here, and the following passage is very similar to
the one quoted above:
Before starting the ignition, Mr. Kapasi reached back to make sure the
cranklike locks on the inside of each of the back doors were secured. As
soon as the car began to move the little girl began to play with the lock on
her side, clicking it with some effort forward and backward, but Mrs. Das
said nothing to stop her. She sat a bit slouched at one end of the back seat,
not offering her puffed rice to anyone. (47)

According to Prince (qtd. in Ryan 1995: 281), a negative sentence is

not an instance of the disnarrated if it can be paraphrased by a positive
sentence that yields an actual event. If we look at the sentence Mrs. Das
said nothing to stop her, we can see that it could be paraphrased as Mrs.
Das just sat there silently.9 But the evaluation that the negative implies
would be at least partially lost. On its own, this particular sentence may
not evoke an alternative where a mother forbids her child to play with the
lock. Compared to the hand-holding sentence, it does not create quite as
vivid an image of the disnarrated reality, but taken together these negatives do create such an image. What is disnarrated is a desired alternative:
the loving but firm mother who holds her childs hand, gently stops her
from fiddling with the lock, and offers her rice to everyone. This is the
norm, and Mrs. Das falls short of it. But since the negatives do not record
a neutrally observable reality, it would be just as appropriate to say that
Mr. Das said nothing to stop the child.
The negatives and the alternative possibilities that they bring up alert
the reader to other similarly charged words. Affirmative sentences in a
narrative are not genuinely descriptive either, for they too reflect cultural
discourses and expectations. To return to the first paragraph, Mrs. Das
9
The word just that I use here expresses the disappointment of expectations (cf. Tannen 37). A negative of the type He never takes out the trash is, I think, the most common
construction in everyday (evaluative) narratives of this kind. It also surfaces in Mr. Kapasis
(unuttered) thoughts about his wife who never asks him about his work (as opposed to Mrs.
Das who does).

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432 LAURA KARTTUNEN

is said to drag her shaved, largely bare legs (cf. Tannens goat). To
an American these features of her legs would go without saying. Like
the negatives above, the qualifiers suggest an alternative, a norm: hairylegged women who cover their bodies. In this sense, Mrs. Das is contrasted to Indian women in general but also to Mr. Kapasis wife who,
the reader later learns, has never revealed as much skin as Mrs. Das does
here. In either case, the norm against which Mrs. Dass legs stand out is
here provided by Mr. Kapasi.
The negations spell out that Mrs. Das is a selfish person and a bad
mother. But according to whose standards? The phrases Mr. Kapasi
watched and Mr. Kapasi reached back to make sure seem to attach
the focus to him. The words used, however, do not reflect his perspective,
for he would hardly think of his car as a bulky white one or refer to
the bathroom facilities by the American term rest room. Nor would he
need to characterize the locks he deals with every day as cranklike a
word which, by virtue of its indefiniteness, indicates an angle of perception that does not belong to the character who is supposed to be focalizing. The disnarrated norm is also deceptively similar to the western ideal
of motherhood to which the Indian Mr. Kapasi may not even subscribe.
Moreover, since at the end of the journey he is surprised by the American
womans self-centeredness, he cannot be conscious of it at this point and
therefore cannot be regarded as the source of the negative evaluation.
Unless, that is, he finds Mrs. Das an inattentive mother and, for this very
reason, an ideal object of desire. In this alternative reading, her selfishness is obvious from the start, but his infatuation makes him block it out
for a while until she shatters his romantic dreams at the end.
There seems to be a recurring discrepancy between the focus implied
by contextual markers (e.g. heard) and the angle of perception inhering
in lexical choices:
Mr. Kapasi found it strange that Mr. Das should refer to his wife by her
first name when speaking to the little girl. Tina pointed to where Mrs. Das
was purchasing something from one of the shirtless men who worked at
the tea stall. Mr. Kapasi heard one of the shirtless men sing a phrase from
a popular Hindi love song as Mrs. Das walked back to the car, but she did
not appear to understand the words of the song, for she did not express
irritation, or embarrassment, or react in any other way to the mans declarations. (4546)

The first sentence records the Indian tourist guides thoughts, so one
would expect the following one to maintain his viewpoint to follow his
gaze as it traverses from Tina to her mother whom she is watching. Yet, to

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A SOCIOSTYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON NEGATIVES AND THE DISNARRATED 433

perceive the men in terms of their shirtlessness requires that the perceiver
conceive of this fact as unusual. While in a colder climate wearing a shirt
would be the norm, this need not be the case in India. Mr. Kapasi does
see some vendors, but he would not necessarily perceive them as specifically lacking an item of clothing. For him, the distinguishing feature
might be, for instance, their caste status. The word shirtless thus exposes
the cultural framework governing the narration here. I would argue that it
is a Western one and must be attributed to the narrator.10
The style of the short story seems to parody anthropological writing
with its penchant for detailed descriptions of everyday items and over-use
of attributives. The same style is used to describe the Indian setting and
the American tourists. Mrs Das, after asking the tour guide whether he
wanted some gum, reached into her straw bag and handed him a small
square wrapped in green-and-white-striped paper (50). The American
tourists eat onions and potatoes deep-fried in graham-flour batter (54).
Since graham-flour is the flour of choice in India, this attribute is redundant and must stem from an outsiders perspective. In Tannens corpus
(40), dirt road was used by urban Americans whereas the Greek informants were happy with road. Givn, too, notes that a sentence such as
A woman with two arms came into my office and . . . is pragmatically
bizarre in our world where people as a rule have two arms, since it fails
to distinguish the figure from the ground (136). Cranklike, shirtless, and
graham-flour are, then, potentially pragmatically bizarre in the situational and cultural context in which they are embedded, since they represent
the (taken-for-granted) ground and not the exceptional figure. The attributives used by Lahiri are not suspect per se, but they become so when
used indiscriminately, regardless of the attribution of the focus.
This kind of detail-ridden style has, of course, been subject not just
to ridicule but to ideological critique, especially when appearing in de10

Several counter-arguments are possible. Mr. Kapasi may pay attention to the shirtlessness of the men because he is sexually attracted to the woman himself and detests their
advances. The bare legs would then also have a sexual connotation. On the other hand, Mr.
Kapasi is very particular about his clothing, so by noting the mens scanty dress he is perhaps
reflecting credit on himself. Or, he might notice the mens shirtlessness precisely because
of what it implies about their caste status, though it would seem more likely for him to register that they are untouchables immediately rather than through this detour. In yet another
alternative reading, the proximity of the Das family makes Mr. Kapasi see his environment
including the locks of his car and the appearance of the vendors in a new light. I thank
my colleagues at the University of Tampere for calling my attention to the multiplicity of
possible readings.

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434 LAURA KARTTUNEN

scriptions of the Orient. As we have seen, the word choices in the story
betray the narrators perspective as an outsider; moreover, this perspective disturbingly borders on Orientalism. When the American Mr. Das
reads a passage from his guide book that deals with the ceremonial role
of the sun temple and the symbolism of the carvings, the narrator steps
in to correct his statement and inform the reader: What he referred to
were the countless friezes of entwined naked bodies, making love in various positions, women clinging to the necks of men, their knees wrapped
eternally around their lovers thighs (57). This kind of de-contextualized
description of erotic artwork tends to be viewed as politically suspect
something only an unenlightened tourist character would produce and
an enlightened narrator would subject to ethical scrutiny. The corrective
cannot be provided by the infatuated Mr. Kapasi, since at this point he
has not yet realized the sexual connotations of the carvings.
Lahiri seems to have created a tourist narrator who overtly passes
judgment, in the form of negatives, on her fellow tourist Mrs. Das while
herself adopting a viewpoint restricted to surface appearances of a culture different from her own. I would tend to regard both features as stylistic failures arising from an assumption of the universality of perception
and reportability which is refuted by Tannens findings. In the passages
quoted Mr. Kapasi is constantly on the verge of becoming a focalizer, but
the perspective is never truly his.

The Disnarrated and the Readers Expectations The God of Small Things
Whether the conceptual backcloth required for understanding negative
sentences is provided by cultural discourses or by a particular narrative
genre, it materializes in the actual readers expectations and hypotheses
concerning the events of a story. Instead of simply illustrating and reflecting cultural and generic expectations, a literary text can weave its
own backcloth and institute its own norms by means of negatives in
the unhappy brides letter and in Shame negatives not only reflect a reality but constitute one.
Starting from the very first sentence, the reader begins to make
hypotheses about how the story will evolve, and these initial hypotheses
make her pay attention to some details and neglect others. Rather than
being unique to each reader, these hypotheses tend to be shared by a
large group of people. In Before Reading, Peter J. Rabinowitz outlines
several rules of configuration that novels generally conform to and that
readers have learned to recognize. The two important metarules pertain to

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A SOCIOSTYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON NEGATIVES AND THE DISNARRATED 435

tellability: it is appropriate to expect that something will happen and that

not anything can happen (117). Thanks to the rules of configuration, the
reader is accustomed to expect certain kinds of events and conclusions.
Rabinowitz (16061) argues that by shattering the readers expectations,
the author can criticize both the conventions and the ideological
assumptions underlying them. The ideological and ethical dimensions of
narrative ordering have been explored in more detail by Meir Sternberg
(1985) and Leona Toker (1993).
The two major events in Roys The God of Small Things are presented
in the negative mode which indicates that disappointing the readers expectations is central to the novels narrative strategy. The first chapter
is dominated by two scenes taking place in 1969: the English girl Sophies funeral and the twins mother Ammus visit to the police station.
These scenes present the reader with two mysteries: how Sophie died
and why the untouchable Velutha is in jail. The fact that these scenes are
placed at the beginning, a privileged position, points to the centrality of
the storylines that they initiate. The impression of Sophies centrality is
enhanced by the narrators comment that her death played a huge part in
the twins lives: The loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was
always there (16). In the first chapter, Sophie and Velutha are often mentioned in close proximity to one another, which suggests a connection.
As Rabinowitz points out (132), if two storylines are presented at the
beginning of a novel, the reader tends to believe that they will eventually
intersect. So something must have happened that kills Sophie and lands
Velutha in jail.
An event with such serious consequences must be a terrible one, and
Roys novel abounds in ominous imagery such as insects rushing to their
untimely death. The impending disaster is referred to by the vague expression the Terror. The sentence featuring both Sophie and Velutha
is preceded by a comment that the era was characterized by disorder
and breaches of the Love Laws: They all tampered with the laws that
lay down who should be loved and how (31). This implicit buildup,
enhanced when Estha is molested by a soft drinks salesman, makes the
reader suspect that Sophie was raped and murdered by Velutha. The hypothesis gains force from the fact that, like the heroine of Forsters A
Passage to India, Sophie is an English girl fresh from England (154).
Like this victim of an alleged rape, Sophie is presented as the centre of a
spectacle, the Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol Play. The fact that the
rape hypothesis is so readily available is indicative of the strength of the
stereotype of the dark skinned rapist.

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The references to the Terror are so vague in the first half of Roys
novel that the reader has no reason to abandon her initial hypothesis. It
is not until the latter half of the book that we are informed of Veluthas
innocence. Sophies centrality is not questioned, though; it is actually
reinforced by unveiling the circumstances of her death little by little, in
non-chronological order, which makes the reader anxious for more details. The reader expects storm music and dramatic events, just like the
ones in the film Chemmeen that is mentioned in the novel. However, Sophies death is not the kind of spectacle the reader has been led to expect:
There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths
of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy. Just a quiet handing
over ceremony (293). The negatives react to the readers expectations
and emphasize the non-novelistic nature of the events: Sophie dies not
like a tragic heroine but like a real little girl. By disappointing the readers
expectations, the novel questions the literary convention that (the death
of) an Englishwoman is a spectacle around which all stories revolve. Once
the hypothesis has been disproved, the reader is able to see a plethora of
stories, most of them not involving any English people at all.

Non-Experienced Trauma and Violence

The negatives in the two central passages of the novel may also be motivated by the fact that the events were not witnessed by the characters.
Sophies death constitutes a gap in the twins experience: she was there
one minute and gone the next. As in the car accident discussed above,
there is no chain of events that could be narrated in the indicative, since
there were no witnesses (not even a shark!). The words orient themselves
not to an object but to discourse. The case of the attack on Velutha is not
as clear-cut since the twins were in fact present. But since the event was
so overwhelmingly brutal, it resulted in trauma. According to theorists of
trauma such as Cathy Caruth (1995), an overwhelming event is not experienced fully at the time but only belatedly. Trauma thus constitutes a void
or a gap in consciousness and remains inaccessible to voluntary recall and
narrative memory. Roys narrator uses disnarration, because the (narrative) memory of the beating is not available to the traumatized twins.11
11
Warhol includes trauma in the category of the antinarratable or what cannot be narrated because of social convention (22425). Her choice of this category over the supranarratable or that which is not susceptible to narration seems to me questionable. In the light
of Caruths theory, trauma seems a clear case of the supranarratable. It is also true, though,

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A SOCIOSTYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON NEGATIVES AND THE DISNARRATED 437

The violent scene at the heart of the novel is anticipated on several occasions, each successive foreshadowing containing a little more information. It is as if the grown-up Rahel is able to remember more and more as
she walks around her childhood neighborhood. The anticipations convey
the atmosphere of threat associated with the event, and the final one hints
at extreme brutality:
Three days before the Terror, he had let them paint his nails with red Cutex
that Ammu had discarded. Thats the way he was the day History visited
them in the back verandah. A carpenter with gaudy nails. The posse of
Touchable Policemen had looked at them and laughed.
Whats this? one had said. AC-DC?
Another lifted his boot with a millipede curled into the ridges of its
sole. (190)

The sadistic laughter of the policemen, the disparaging remark about the
painted nails and the lifting of the boot suggest that ruthless violence is
to follow. The readers expectations are thus geared towards a lynching
scene and the savage sight of a mutilated black body. However, the most
brutal acts of violence are disnarrated:
Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable
Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didnt tear out his hair or burn him alive.
They didnt hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didnt
rape him. Or behead him. (309)

Since the reader is expecting a violent spectacle, the negatives, in defeating that expectation, represent a sudden rise in informativeness. If the
violence were presented incrementally, starting from something small
and ending up in a beheading, the reader would grow numb, and each
event would only confirm her expectation. Roys strategy is more effective rhetorically, for by suspending the action at this climactic juncture
and switching to evaluation, she ensures that the passage will stand out
from the rest of the narrative (cf. Labov 374). The scene as a whole taps
into the readers emotions and narrative desire in a complicated way. If
the reader wants to see a violent scene, the seven-year-old twins will
that social norms dictate the legitimate causes for mourning. In The God of Small Things, the
death of an English girl is a legitimate cause for grief but the death of an untouchable at the
hands of the police is not. Both traumatizing events are supranarratable but only the latter is
antinarratable.

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have to see it too, for they are the only eye-witnesses. The reader knows
that the twins were traumatized by the event, but the anticipations have
fuelled her desire to know the cause of the trauma. She experiences the
pull of two conflicting impulses: the ethical and the epistemic.12
The mental images of a lynching mob tearing out hair or hacking off
genitals are so strong that they eclipse the negation altogether. The findings of Mayo et al. suggest that in uni-polar cases such as this one, where
the negation does not involve a pair of antonyms such as lazy/hard-working, the message is encoded as a core supposition and a negation tag.
Processing such a negative may facilitate negation-incongruent associations, and the negation tag may fall off entirely in time.13 In other words,
a sentence such as The scarf was not blue can make the reader see blue
initially which may eventually lead her to forget the negation altogether.
The assault on Velutha is narrated (in the indicative) in medical terms that
evoke Enlightenment ideas of order: A clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide). . . . They were
merely inoculating a community against an outbreak (309). Compared
to the brutalities disnarrated, these concepts are abstract and not visually
evocative. Therefore the former are more likely to stick in the readers
mind despite being presented in the negative mode.
The scope of the negation in the passage quoted does not necessarily
extend to all kinds of violence. The construction unlike . . . religious
12
The kind of violent spectacle that is disnarrated here would fall into Labovs category
of events that are always reportable. However, in the context of fiction and in the co-text
of Roys narrative, such violence is to be expected, which makes the ordinary, routine violence exercised by the police the more reportable option. Faulkner, for instance, plays with
the readers generic expectations in Sanctuary by presenting a rape narrative that does not
culminate in the lynching of a black man. Sternberg (1978: 101) calls attention to a similar
rhetorical strategy in Light in August, where the primacy effect is shattered by the delayed
exposition: [Faulkner] has thus brought to life some of the most primitive and contemptible
instincts and prejudices that lie dormant within us, particularly the racial ones; and the trap
has been so elaborately devised that it is difficult to avoid falling into it. . . . The recency
effect not only blows to pieces the Myth of the Murderous, Black-hearted Nigger, but also
opens our incredulous eyes to the bitter discovery that in essence there is little to choose
between us and the mob of lynchers who are out for Christmass blood. This also happens
to be an accurate description of the ethical implications of Roys rhetorical strategy. See also
Tokers analysis of A Passage to India where the readers tendency to suspect the Indian
guide or a Pathan of attempted rape is seen as a case of narrative entrapment rather than of
xenophobia (14041).
13
See also Hasson and Glucksberg for similar findings. Katajamki (2000) uses the term
paradoxical imagining to refer to the strong mental images conjured by negative sentences.
Rushdies negatives discussed above trigger such paradoxical imagining.

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mobs suggests a contrast between the actual deeds of the policemen, or

guardians of the state, and the hypothetical deeds of frenzied, anarchic,
hysterical religious mobs. The policemens attack on the untouchable
man is obviously brutal; the scene concludes with a list of his multiple
injuries including a fractured skull. This highlights the irony of the texts
suggestion that there may be different kinds of violence: the brutal kind
and the civilized kind. Interpreted against one possible frame of reference, the intertextual one, the passage may be read as a corrective to
Conrads Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, a pathological individual, is sometimes held responsible for the atrocities in that novella while postcolonial
readings tend to see them as symptoms of colonialist rule. By calling the
crime scene Heart of Darkness, Roy underlines the systematic and institutional aspect of (post-)colonial violence. She uses negatives to contest the view of violence as a symptom of individual pathology: [The
twins] watched, mesmerized by something they sensed but didnt understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where
anger should have been (308). The ironic use of medical terminology
discussed above exposes the idea of civilized violence as untenable.
The fact that the worst kinds of violence are denied in this particular
case suggests that they are in fact the norm. To mention one untouchable who was not hanged draws attention to the background consisting
of a number of untouchable victims of police brutality. In this case the
negatives do not so much create as reflect the social context, for police
violence against untouchables is a fact.

***
Novels as a rule deal with individual experience, and The God of Small
Things has been read (erroneously) as an apolitical story of illicit love.
By pointing to the conceptual backcloth or cultural frame of reference
against which individual utterances can be understood, negatives urge
the reader to go beyond the boundaries of the individual text. Rather than
drawing attention to the fate of one particular untouchable, the disnarrated brings into focus all those other untouchables who have suffered
at the hands of the police. Instances of the disnarrated encourage us to
read metonymically rather than metaphorically, to look for signs of the
(postcolonial) context in the literary text.

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