Reading the Disnarrated:

Traumatic Memory, Disrupted Communication, and the Crisis of Modernity in Jeet Thayil’s Low

Abstract

This paper reads Jeet Thayil’s Low (2020) as a disjointed narrative that defies linearity to accentuate the circular nature of traumatic memory and grief. Chasing forgetfulness, Dominic Ullis flies to a modern Bombay to immerse his wife, Aki’s ashes and submerge his traumatic memories, but his attempts are thwarted by an involuntary recall of events that may have led to her suicide, contextualised within her recurrent retreats to ‘the low’ – a melancholic space she claimed to have access to. By observing past instances of miscommunication and missed communication between Ullis and Aki, and their hallucinatory conversation in the present, the paper examines how Ullis’s journey is guided by Gerald Prince’s concept of ‘the disnarrated’ to narrate his unresolved emotions surrounding traumatic loss retrospectively. Constituting “events that did not happen, but, nonetheless, are referred to,” the disnarrated, the paper argues, manifests itself in Ullis’s traumatic memory, as he gets flashbacks to events that did occur between him and Aki to express his regret for the ones that did not but could have (Prince 3). Drawing upon John F. Schumaker’s arguments connecting mental health with modernity, the paper proposes that Aki’s depressive condition, as residing in ‘the low,’ and her eventual suicide are consequences of her loneliness and unfulfilled relationships aggravated by the modernisation that characterises the urban landscape. Finally, it establishes disnarration as a powerful tool for mediating between an imaginary, hopeful world premised on possibilities of communication and the bleaker modern reality where mental health issues are silenced or stigmatised and thus fail to be expressed – allowing for a socio-cultural critique.