https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.040
The Poetics of Thirdspace: Memory, Trauma, and Belonging in The God of Small Things
JOUHAR SADATH K
Research Scholar, Department of English
Government College Malappuram, Affiliated to University of Calicut
& Assistant Professor on Contract, NSS College Manjeri
DR. SHAHINA MOL AK
Associate Professor & Head
Department of English, KAHM Unity Women’s College Manjeri
Abstract: Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), constructs a complex spatial world in which places are inseparable from lived experience, memory, social hierarchy, intimacy, and trauma. Set largely in Ayemenem, Kerala, the novel presents houses, rivers, factories, roads, institutional spaces, and childhood hiding places as spaces whose meanings are continually produced through the interaction of material surroundings, social representations, and individual experience. This paper reads the novel through Edward W. Soja’s theory of Thirdspace, particularly his spatial trialectic of Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace. Firstspace is examined as the material and perceptible organization of places: the ancestral Ayemenem House, the Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory, the Meenachil River, the History House, and institutional spaces in Kottayam. Secondspace is examined as the conceived and socially organized dimension of those places, including the ideas, classifications, rules, and authoritative meanings that determine who belongs, who is excluded, and how bodies may move. Thirdspace emerges when these material and conceived dimensions are lived, remembered, imagined, negotiated, and contested by characters. The novel consequently demonstrates how Thirdspace can illuminate the relationship among place, power, memory, trauma, and belonging without requiring a second theoretical framework.
Keywords: Edward Soja, Firstspace, Secondspace, Thirdspace, Lived space, Spatiality, Memory, Trauma, Belonging
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