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Literary Review
Post-colonial hybrid mindscape
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Salman Rushdie takes a balanced perspective and avoids the trap of making the man or the fatwa eclipse his art, says SEETHA SRINIVASAN.
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THE recent, innovative series "Contemporary World Writers" includes, among others, Toni Morrison, Peter Carey, and Anita Desai. Salman Rushdie heads the list and rightly too, as fictional works can now belong to a pre- or post-Rushdie ambience.
The editorial aim is to provide an "authoritative introduction to culturally diverse contemporary writers". Salman Rushdie has been at the epicentre of cultural storms as individual and artist, the charismatic subject of ongoing debates on post-colonial issues such as race, religion, nation, identity, their hybridisation, subversion and revision. In critically examining Rushdie's art, the ever-present danger of making the man and the fatwa override or eclipse his art is neatly circumvented in this balanced perspective.
The series continues, albeit differently, the tradition of earlier studies like "Profiles in Literature" or "Indian Writers Series". However, it scores over them in that it is not a mere informative and critical monograph. It moves into the realm of contemporary theoretical frames and seeks to analyse and clarify texts even as it postulates intertexts. This sophisticated use of critical theory gives the much-needed punch to a study which is an excellent introduction to the author and his works.
The traditional "life and works" chapter has been replaced by the "contexts and intertexts" introduction, a kind of "old wine in new bottle" formula. Ms. Cundy adheres strictly to chronology, facilitating insights into life and art. A structuralist reading is thus pre-empted.
Rushdie's fiction has the excitement of novelty (or is it just post-modernist fragmentations, fissures, splinters?) — it is "mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that". This description reinforces the argument of "cultural diversity" that runs as a thread through all the chapters. Ms. Cundy underscores the hybridity of Rushdie's background, the paradox of his being "too English for the Indian" and "too Indian for the English": This may explain his "rootless disaffiliated Philotectus status". Through extensive use of existing critical statements and relying heavily on Bhaba's idea of "indeterminacy of diasporic identity", Ms. Cundy sees the way out of "racisms and xenophobic nationalism" which bedevil contemporary society and thought.
Each of the six ensuing segments is devoted to Rushdie's works in chronological order. Holistic perception is achieved through cross-references and intertextual citations. The second chapter, devoted to Grimus (1975), anagram of "Sumirg", begins with the reinforcement of this idea as it anticipates the theoretic and stylistic preoccupation of Rushdie's later works. Eastern and western works as intertexts (and not mere influences) are suggested. Among others they include Dante's Divine Comedy, Farid-ud-Attar's Conference of Birds and Johnson's Rasselas. While this may seem an exercise in comparative criticism, Ms. Cundy's sophisticated and neat explication underscores intertextuality, polyphony and archetype.
IT may be surprising to note that even though Salman Rushdie wrote Grimus with the Gollancz Prize for Science Fiction in mind, Ms. Cundy does not see it as such. Grimus incorporates a variety of literary styles, tries on "cultures like used clothing". It is more a picaresque novel with the journey motif at the centre and fantasy thrown in for spice. At best, it is a "test-run" for the successful novels of the 1980s. The novel has no concrete, identifiable, geographic location and hence issues like identity or the legacy of colonisation get blurred. Unless the mind latches itself to a place, it is not possible to achieve cohesion.
The Amerindian culture of the Axona explores alternative societies even while confronting forces of change. Phoenix combines the "automation and soullessness" of contemporary times, a situation comparable to that in Johnson's Happy Valley. Only a well-read academic can relate to the parallels cited and if Happy Valley or even Grimus becomes the unknown text, the breakdown of "intellectual postures" is an inevitable critical hazard, even if these are "manifestations" of post-coloniality, which she avers is a "creative" concern of Rushdie in "producing a new kind of cultural representation".
Rushdie's borrowings from Dante consist of topographical and stylistic devices. Flapping Eagle's ascent through Calf Mountain parallels Dante's and Virgil's movement in the circles of Hell. Possibly, other well-known texts with the age-old motif can also be cited. However, this example alone enriches Rushdie's writing.
To "universalise" or "globalise" or even "liberalise" Rushdie's creation, Ms. Cundy avers that Grimus does not restrict its intertexts to western models. The most direct eastern influence upon its construction is the Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr) a 12th Century religious poem by the Sufi Mystic Farid-ud-Din-Attar. This may have influenced Haroun and the Sea of Stories as well. Ms. Cundy thus sees intertextuality not only as a critical-creative phenomenon within Rushdie's works, but also as extending to Rushdie's works from a world literary tradition.
THE chapter on Midnight's Children (1981) focuses on the amalgamation of eastern content and western form to achieve the near ideal of a "hybrid post-colonial text". In this it is seen as a more successful attempt than Grimus. The novelist and critic underscore the obvious aspects of the oral tradition of story telling that the novel has internalised. What the author has said about his own creation has to be lapped up by the critic per se! The absence of a linear plot is seen as the influence of the epics — The Mahabharata and the Ramayana with their numerous digressive lore. The structure thus has to be necessarily episodic. The "swoops, the spirals, the digressions and the reiterations" so characteristic of oral narrative are all there in Midnight's Children. And for the heightened effect of a post-modern, post-colonial, "intertext" with omniscient narration, Padma is a "critic within the text" and also reader and co-creator of the narrative. The richness of technique results in exciting multiple interpretative possibilities.
Even as the reader can have a symbiotic relationship with the writer, leading to varying conclusions, the art of memory is seen as important to the construction of the narrative. The effect is more cumulative than symbolic as in the case of the silver spittoon which helps to crystallise Saleem's sense of his personal history. The flying spittoon which brains him induces a state of amnesia — he loses his memory and consequently his identity. To quote Cundy: "Memory is the chain which connects the post-colonial subject to his/ her disrupted history". The thorough knowledge of even the rambling text is evidenced in the critic's authoritative references to other identical recollections of history which are based on facts.
A post-modern postulate is the idea of nationalism and the construct of nation vis-à-vis individual identity. The critic cleverly argues that Saleem's embrace of Pakistan citizenship is an embrace of non-identity. However, Saleem's individualisation of identity is achieved through his relations to the "usual units of family and community handcuffed both to history and society". Midnight's Children prefigures Shame in depicting the realities of political life and the abuses of dictatorial power. Indira Gandhi as "Black Widow" locates her as "historical reality and monstrous fantasy." However, exception is taken to Rushdie's misogynism with reference to Indira Gandhi. Art and life crossed in the libel suit against Rushdie and the offending passages, that Indira Gandhi was responsible for her husband's death and the Emergency terms were removed in the subsequent edition.
An interesting point raised in the critique is that Rushdie was breaking away from western depictions of India — even in the mockery of Forster's Dr. Azeez through Saleem's grandfather Aadam. Also the use of the cinema screen as metaphor is seen as a debunking of the quasi-mystical language adopted by Forster and Scott for the baffling Indian reality.
Cundy highlights the technical brilliance of Midnight's Children. Different narrative techniques are effectively debated in the text — mythic, filmic, real, and fantastic pre-occupations jostle one another with amazing ease even as realism is subverted with genius strokes. The real and the fantastic in relation to characters have parallels to mythical archetypes in the Hindu pantheon. Saleem, like Rushdie, knows Hindu stories and the textual Shiva is Saleem's alter ego.
If language is an expressive aspect of technique, then Midnight's Children vividly explores both the metaphorical nature of language and as a bar to communication — what Cundy asserts as the Indianisation or Rushdification of English. The riots between Marathi and Gujarati speakers show language as a site of conflict as well. Saleem's communication with other children of midnight makes him both transmitter and creative artist. Cundy also observes that names are crucial in Midnight's Children. Assuming new names, as in Grimus, Parvathi's becomes Layla, Mumtaz's becomes Amina and Nadir Khan's becomes Quasim, the Red. Cross-references to Rushdie's other works and the works of writers like Nayantara Sahgal vitalise this brief critique. The lack of subtlety is seen as a weakness even as one has to accept this as part of the creative endeavour to root a text in a post-modern plurality even while accommodating national specifics.
THAT Cundy's criticism of Rushdie is vestibule and not close compartment is underscored in the chapter on Shame (1983), which establishes the link between Midnight's Children, Shame and Satanic Versus. Shame is seen as a model of closed construction unlike the other two novels. The salient feature is the cyclical pattern of imagery — the umbilical cord around Hyder's dead child parallels the noose around the neck of Hyder's rival. In the argument of content over form or vice-versa, here content dictates form. Shame is a realistic novel and not entirely a roman-a-clef. It is set in Pakistan, and deals centrally with the way in which "the sexual repressions of that country are connected to the political repressions".
As in the reading of Midnight's Children and that of Satanic Verses later, effective and convincing use of internal cross-references is a notable critical feature. Intertextuality and not influence, with citations from Rubaiyyat (even if for the name Omar only), Burton's The Thousand and One Nights, the poems of Battala and The Qur'an itself as "model and intertext", gives a certain élan to the criticism though the reader/ academic's reading must have the same range — a tall order in today's instant world.
One of the most interesting parallels drawn is that between Omar, almost a voyeur, and Saleem in Midnight's Children and Baal in Satanic Verses. The setting Q (may be Quetta) is a more generalised location than Ellowen Deeowen of the Satanic Verses. Geography and topography are centre-staged in the construction and argument of all Rushdie's novels. The country is not Pakistan and yet it is — existing like Rushdie "at a slight angle to reality" invented in one's own imagination. Ghosh's Shadow Lines, in its ethereal division of Calcutta and Dacca, is a fluent parallel to this "imagined divisions". A brilliant illustration of these "shadow lines" which cross the thematic, textual and geographic terrain of Shame is given (pp. 48-50). Space constraints forbid reproduction.
In considering the narrative technique employed in Shame, it is possible to identify the stories of the individual protagonists, namely the women of Bariamma's Zenana. These contribute to weave the complete fabric of the text. They make the more digression with the asides of the narrator to illustrate the intersections between the personal and the national or political as in Midnight's Children. Authorial control prevails and it may have affected adversely the narrative itself.
A pioneering and critically valuable comment on technique is the "deconstructionist" mode of postulating untold alternative stories and "feminisation" of the male plot. In Shame, the fascination with the domestic and sexual power of women is more evident than in the other novels. This makes for a viable feminist reading. Cundy avers that Rushdie invokes the "iconic feminist victim" in the male imprisoned Zenobia. What comes through with force is the hostility towards female autonomy and the resulting insistence on their powerlessness vis-à-vis men. This is seen as Rushdie's possible guilt of self-deception as a champion of women.
Even though much narrative time has been given to women characters, Rushdie cannot escape from the gender-based prejudices and conditioning which he ostensibly purports to explode. A case in point is chapter VII of Shame. The innocent/ whore binarism seen in Anahita and Sufiya and Anahita and Mishal Sufiyan in Satanic Verses, according to Ms. Cundy, shows Rushdie's ability to conceive of women only in extreme terms and his inability to control them to be one or the other. However, it is clear that Rushdie has not fully succeeded in articulating a female narrative of Pakistan's history.
In concluding the reading of Shame, the critic cleverly argues that a coherent and positive image of the migrant post-colonial subject is projected. She avers that migration, flight and dislocation are perpetual themes in Rushdie's writing and the means by which he seeks to express the migrant writer's peculiar sensibility as it searches for new forms, new techniques, new worlds, to define itself. The shadow line is the figure of the migrant itself. Is he rooted in ideas or in places and material objects? The "mohajir" is a term that Rushdie uses for all his displaced characters in the texts. The narrative voice in Shame declares that he is a "translated" man. Rushdie sees in "translation" and "metaphor" the meaning of "carry across" so closely related to the idea of migration exemplified in the later text as well.
That Shame is a hybrid novel is problematised by its relation to allegorical forms of writing. It is pointed out that the text "shifts between reality/ unreality; Pakistan/ Peccavistan; fiction and factual narrative interventions" and this is evidence of the strongly representational mode. Examples are plenty in Rani Harappa's 18 shawls, each of which depicts allegorical frames. Critics like Brennan insist on Rushdie being an allegorist relying on the mode to convey the social, political, and national arguments of the author and justify authorial intervention in the texts. But here too "subjectivity" and author's point of view weaken the story line. And Rushdie's claim that his books are "realistic" novels makes the reading untenable — possibly there is an allegorical "instinct" seen in the portrayal of General Zia. Shame remains at best a hybrid text even as it paves the way for migration as "flight" in later works.
TO review a critique of Satanic Verses (1989) in a political landscape where it is banned has to necessarily be a capsule reproduction of the critique's significant statements. Cundy remarks that like his heroes, Rushdie has become a peripheral man with a terrible unmaking of his identity. The book has become and is still a byword for trouble, the fatwa is the tragedy of the artist and the book. Cundy laments the situation where the book is judged not as an artistic enterprise exploring the condition of the post-colonial migrant subject in the binarism of location and dislocation, past and present memory and history but as a "cultural and political crisis" generating a welter of debates, book-burnings and "genteel disdain".
To show the nature of the controversy in the treatment of events within the life of the Prophet Mohammed, a brief recount with quotations from the Qur'an (translated by N.J. Dawood) is given in the text. Rushdie recreates the female deities as daughters of Allah, the supreme Semitic God. Among those were Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Marat who represented the Sun, Venus, and Fortune respectively. In the Satanic Verses, Uzza represents beauty and love, Marat, fate while Lat is the omnipotent mother Goddess, Allah's female counterpart (pp. 99-100). The early Islamic controversy regarding the intervention of goddesses may have been seen by the prophet as a practical road to unanimity as stated in Rodinson's translation of Al Tabari. The Satanic Verses and their significance to Rushdie's text is "their central debate about the importance and power of women" which governs the "reconstructing of migrant identity".
According to Ms. Cundy, Saladin Chamcha and Gabriel Farishta, the protagonists, provide "the most direct image in Rushdie's fiction of the post-colonial subject in collision with his world. Their descent on England, the fabled country of Vilayet from the wreck of the hijacked plane is full of the tensions of their condition, defying the laws of gravity, just two brown men falling down". The fall encapsules transmutation, translation, migration, and even a discontinuity of identity and this multiple reading is made credible only by the expertise of a post-colonial critic and academic.
To prove the positive reassertion of the migrant's identity, The Satanic Verses is compared to V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1990). The lengthy (pp. 79-81) study emphasises the intertextuality of contemporary, post-colonial fictions. It also facilitates the critical deflection from a religious-controversy-ridden text and deconstructs the controversy itself. The post-colonial critical exercise is marked by fluent and authoritative references to both fictions and critical tools. What follows is a summary retelling.
Both the novels illustrate "the migrant's problems of self-contextualisation, of being located and dislocated in terms of history and identity". The settings of texts from unlocatable geography (in Grimus) to the real England or fairy-tale Anglo-India (through Pakistan and India) of Naipaul, the Vilayet England of Rushdie are evidence of the disordered, divided personalities of the protagonists. They are actors, cultural chameleons. Saladin, with his female counterpart Mini Mamonlan, monopolises marketing for advertising voice-overs and with his Indian lover, Zeeny Vakil, his personality is like a palimpsest, a slate reinscribed by Anglophilia.
Gibreel and Naipaul differ in their perception of reality which is "dense" and "blinding" to the former. The latter is all contempt for "fantasy and anti-realism". However, both narratives are similar in that they share the "writer's sense of their own mortality". Memory too is crucial to the migrant's sense of history. In Enigma and Satanic Verses it becomes a passport to "Englishness" be it in memorizing facts and figures in school or the A-Z of London maps. Both texts are concerned with journeys and arrivals. To contrast their treatment, Bakhtin's ideas are applied. Where Rushdie's mode is dialogic, Naipaul's is clearly monologic. Language, unlike in Rushdie, is not a site of struggle. Rushdie's book is seen as a "modern Menippean satire".
In her convincing concluding remarks, Ms. Cundy commends the deployment of polyphony in creating a migrant identity even as Rushdie points to the "process of hybridisation which is the novel's most crucial dynamic." The discordant voices in Grimus have harmonised into a work "that reflects the Sufi ideal of diversity within unity" and asserts its "multiform nature as its defining characteristic".
THAT continuities operate consistently in Rushdie's fiction is seen in the brilliant linking of the reference to a wonderful lamp in Satanic Verses with Saladin "at the window of his childhood" possibly looking back at a dead father in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). It may also be Rushdie's own childhood recreated, for the fascination for Wizard of Oz and magic prevailed. In this book, there is "the coalescing in the guise of a narrative for children, of debates about the freedom of expression and the liberty of the artistic imagination, a reworking of old stories into new and the status of popular culture". It may be metafiction, a technique seen in all his works. More significantly, the Rushdie corpus will be a paradise for "intertextuality" critics. And yet, "what is the use of stories that aren't even true?" (Haroun, pp.88-89)
From the "story within a story", the concluding two chapters of this absorbing study include a critical overview (Chapter VII) and a seven-page taste of The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) linking it to previous Rushdie lore. There are very few book length studies of Rushdie and this work therefore becomes extremely significant in the critical canon. The comprehensive citation of critical articles and journals will be extremely useful to scholars. So also the select bibliography. The contemporaneity of critical theories such as post-modernism, magic realism validates Rushdie's creative endeavours.
All in all, Ms. Catherine Cundy's Salman Rushdie has been an intellectual treat. It enjoins the reader (like the reviewer) to get back to the delights of the creative texts through the challenging critical readings.
Salman Rushdie, Catherine Cundy, Contemporary World Writers<243>
Series, Manchester University
Press, 1996, p. 137, special Indian price Rs. 250.
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