Postmodern Paradigm and Salman Rushdie’S Fiction

By Dr Shaikh Suhel Samad

The book highlights postmodern fiction and more so Rushdies fiction, which is concerned with:

1. A preoccupation with viability of systems and representations
2. The decentring of the subject and the inscription of multiple fictive selves
3. Narrative fragmentation, narrative reflexivity, and narratives which double-back on their own presuppositions
4. An open-ended play with formal divides challenging the presuppositions of literary realism
5. Abolition of the cultural divide between high and popular forms of culture, embracing all in a mlange
6. The displacement of the real by simulacra in Baudrillardian sense
7. Incredulity toward the metanarratives as Lyotard puts it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482885255

Dr Shaikh Suhel Samad

Dr Shaikh Suhel Samad is an assistant professor in English, Sir Sayyed College of Arts, Commerce, and Science, affiliated to Dr BAM University, Aurangabad, MS, India. He did his PhD on postmodernism. He completed UGC Research Project titled “Thomas Pynchon and Postmodernity.” He has published eleven articles in reputed journals. He guided seven students for MPhil degree and currently two students are working for their PhD under his guidance. Dr Shaikh Suhel Samad has presented papers in many national and international conferences. He has delivered lectures to postgraduate and MPhil classes in various colleges. He is a regular resource person for refresher courses at Academic Staff College, SGBA University, Amravati. His area of specialization is literary criticism, critical theory, postmodernism, and linguistics. His area of interest is cultural studies and postmodern literature. Currently, he is working on a book on linguistics and critical theory.

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Copyright © 2016 by Dr Shaikh Suhel Samad.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgment

Foreword

Preface

Postmodernism

Subversive Strategy

Self-Reflexivity: Fiction And ‘Historical Amnesia’

‘Bricolage’: Plagiarism or Pla(y)Giarism?

Postmodern Double-Talk

Transcultural Ethos: Loss of the (Anteriority) of the Self

Mapping The Unmappable: ‘Heteroglossia’ And Incredulity Towards Meta-Narratives

Lexical Exhibitionism

Conclusion

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

First of all I would like to express my gratitude to Almighty God for endowing me with great patience and determination required to complete this project.

I am greatly indebted to Prof. Mabel Fernandes, Dept of English, Dr BAM University, Aurangabad, whose critical insights and encouragement, during the stages of writing the book has made this task possible.

I must thank the authorities and staff of EFLU, Hyderabad, Indo-American Research Centre, Hyderabad, British Library, Pune and Dr. BAM University, Aurangabad for their benevolent attitude and permission to use the library.

I must express my sense of gratitude to Prof. Mohd. Tilawat Ali, Founder President, RECWS, Aurangabad for his motivation. Thanks to Dr. Shaikh Kabeer Ahmed, Principal, Sir Sayyed College for his encouragement. I must thank Head, Dept. of English, Sir Sayyed College, Dr. Farhat Durrani for her motivation and support. Thanks are also due to my Departmental colleagues Prof. Syed Zahir Abbas and Prof. Mohammed Ahmeduddin for their help and suggestions. Special thanks to Prof. Nisar Ahmed for his help and support. I must also thank Prof. Shaikh Mohd. Azhar, Vice-Principal of the College, Dr. Shaikh Baseer and Prof. Feroj Deshmukh for their encouragement.

I must not forget to express my gratitude to my parents, Dr Shaikh Samad, Director, YCMOU, Aurangabad, Shaikh Abeda and siblings for their moral support. I must also thank my wife Sakina and kids Arhaam and Abdul Hamid for providing a congenial atmosphere at home, required to accomplish this task.

My friends Dr. Ajay Deshmukh and Dr. Shankar Gavali have given me their unequivocal support as always.

Last but not the least, my sincere thanks to Partridge Publications for publishing this book. I profusely thank the entire team of Partridge Publications which offered me timely guidance at various stages of production of this book.

I would like to acknowledge that although most of the material here has never been published before, a version of Section VIII appeared in the book Role of Language and Culture in Society(2014).Fragments of Section III appeared in the journal Research Scholar: An International Refereed e-journal of Literary Explorations (Vol 3, Issue II, May, 2015) and New Voices.(Vol II, Issue VIII, April 2015)

FOREWORD

The present book is an indepth study of Salman Rushdie’s Fiction from a Postmodernist Perspective. Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British author, is considered as one of the most influential authors of postmodern literature. His novel, Midnight’s Children, catapulted him to literary fame and is often considered his best work to date.

The study, quite effectively, analyzes Salman Rushdie’s Fiction in the light of Postmodernist strategies employed by him. The study is neatly divided into nine sections. The Introductory Section focuses on the theoretical postulates of postmodernism and throws light on the features of Postmodern Fiction.

At present, Postmodernism has become a dominant view, a new critical and theoretical point of view. The theory of Postmodernism is mainly found in the works of Habermas, Lyotard and Baudrillard. Habermas in his influential paper ‘Modernity-An Incomplete Project’ reacted against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. The French theorists like Derrida and Foucault attacked the ideas of reason, clarity, truth and progress. It marked the end of the age of ‘order, unity and security’. Derrida propounded that there is no ‘centre’, no fixed points, no absolutes. Everything is in a state of flux. Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, remarked that ‘grand narratives’ of human progress and perfectability are no longer tenable. He advocated ‘mini-narratives’, which are written by specific groups in particular local circumstances, in opposition to ‘mainstream’. Thus, there is an upsurge in minority literature and we find a multiplicity of view instead of a ‘united view’. Hence there is difference, opposition and plurality. Further, in Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulations, we find the famous principle of Postmodernism, known as ‘the loss of the real’ or ‘the disappearance of the real’. Today, we live in the age of virtual reality. In our TV serials, films and advertisements we feel this ‘loss of the real’. What we find is mostly the dream element, fantasy and illusion. So Baudrillard calls our culture’ a culture of hyperreality’ where these distinctions disappear. Finally, the Postmodernists challenged the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. To them, our literature is indeed a ‘hybrid’ literature. The Postmodernists view their past with ‘irony’.

The introductory section brings out these facets of postmodernism in a well-organized manner. It also briefly discusses some postmodern novelists and their fictional strategies. The rest of the sections analyze Rushdie’s novels in the light of the major postmodern strategies such as subversiveness, self-reflexivity, bricolage, irony, loss of the self, polyvocality, ruptured language etc in a sequential manner and reaches to a logical conclusion.

The deployment of postmodern strategies makes Salman Rushdie a very complex and difficult writer. But Dr Shaikh Suhel through his systematic and methodic analysis of the postmodernist traits has accomplished the challenging task of understanding the complex texts of a postmodern writer. All praise to the writer for paving the way for the upcoming researchers desirous to know what postmodernism is!

Prof. Mabel Fernandes

Dept of English

Dr. BAM University

Aurangabad. MS

INDIA.

PREFACE

My deep interest and fascination towards Theory, particularly Postmodernism, was a propelling force to write this book. However, a confusion that preceded the writing of this book was my dual state of mind; whether to lay more emphasis on Postmodernism or to focus on Rushdie’s fiction, both of which I cannot afford to understate. This confusion, nevertheless, is symptomatic of a current debate on whether Theory should be accorded more importance or literature should be given significance and priority.

It is now difficult to think of literary studies without some appreciation of the philosophical and methodological insights emanating from Theory. Whether one likes it or not, one has to acquire its knowledge and engage with it. One needs to understand Theory so as to appreciate the complex relationship between literature and culture. Theory is, therefore, a tool that can enable us to understand the various modes of knowledge that are constructed and disseminated. Therefore, I sought to analyze and view Salman Rushdie’s Fiction with the lens of Postmodern Theory.

Postmodernism is quite a complicated concept that has stormed the academic world since 1960s. Postmodernism as a cultural ideology has affected several disciplines such as literature and the other arts, politics, sociology, economics and even cybernetics. It is no longer an aesthetic concept but a social and cultural force having a profound impact on every dimension of life. Many critics have been involved in discussing and debating Postmodernism in divergent ways. But Postmodernism means different to different people; the meaning of Postmodernism is not clear, it continues to elude and baffle the readers. Similarly, postmodern fiction is difficult to understand due to the incorporation of complex postmodern strategies within its ambit. Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre is situated in postmodern context and hence demands a different kind of reading. The need to write this book stems from predominantly two reasons; one, partially due to my personal leanings towards Postmodernism and secondly to decipher the meaning of a postmodern text in a way that it needs to be done. It was also felt that few books are written on this topic and hence the urge to write this book for the benefit of the researchers was irresistible.

The book contains nine sections. Section one discusses postmodernism, incorporates views of some postmodern critics, postmodern fictional strategies and some postmodern writers. The rest of the sections focus on the different postmodern strategies employed by Rushdie in his fiction and ultimately leading to a logical conclusion.

Rushdie subverts the conventional forms of story -telling. Magic Realism or Fantasy are used as subversive strategies. In Grimus, the people, places and the events all appear to be highly fantasized. The orders of reality are broken and realized into newer patterns. In Midnight’s Children, it involves the telepathic abilities of Saleem and the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947 (the date of Indian independence), abilities that enable them to communicate with each other and in Saleem’s case, to read the minds of those around him. In Shame, Rushdie again transgresses the boundaries of fact and fiction. Some important elements of fantasy are disorientation in time, dislocation in space and distortion in actuality. Magic realism mingles mundane with fantastic. All these are found in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury.

Postmodern fiction, being intensely self-reflexive, the term ‘metafiction’ or ‘historiographic metafiction’ is used to describe this style.It refers to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures. Public and private coalesce and there is temporal distortion.Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is historiographic metafiction as in this novel, the author does not accurately recount the events of Indian history. He deliberately commits mistakes on details or dates in order to comment on the unreliability of historical and biographical accounts. Here, Saleem’s personal history is paralleled with national history. In Shame, the center of power is posited against the peripheral figures of the protagonist Omar Khayyam Shakil and the women, mainly the heroine Sufiya Zenobia who embodies in quite a literal way Pakistan itself. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie has used history as the background to the life and tragedy of Moraes Zogoiby.

Rushdie uses bricolage to designate various relationships that a given text may have with other texts. This strategy is closely connected with other postmodern concepts such as the death of the author, the emancipation of the reader, the end of mimesis, fragmentation and syncretism and infinite regress. Grimus mainly echoes Dante’s Divine Comedy, Farid-ud-din Attar’s Conference of the Birds and even Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Midnight’s Children draws on the models of the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The text also invokes Scherazade’s plight at the hands of King Shahryar in The Thousand and One Nights. Quran forms an important intertext for Shame and the novel also echoes mainly Attar’s Conference of the Birds and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Haroun and the Sea of Stories draws on The Thousand and One Nights and Dickens’ Little Doritt. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie employs his own work as an intertext and also alludes to Shakspeare’s plays, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. The Ground Beneath Her Feet bears several allusions and references to Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The novel also alludes to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree as well as fiction such as Star Trek. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Fury repeatedly alludes to Russian film Solaris and other science fiction.

Postmodern irony with playfulness and black humour is characterized by multiplicity, instability and paradox. It destabilizes meaning itself.It legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies. Through double encoding, postmodern irony questions and challenges the dominant ideology and then construct the present through representation.Postmodern writers like Rushdie treat serious subjects in a humourous way. Religion and women has been satirized in Grimus. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie ironically satirized the politics of regionalism in India. Shame revels in the paradox that its military dictators, venal civilians, corrupt civil servants, bought judges are pallid, phantom images of these caricatures of ‘real’ personalities of Pakistan. Rushdie uses irony in The Moor’s Last Sigh to highlight sexual exploitation of girls by the church priests and the love-affair between the former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. The character of Piloo Doodhawala in The Ground Beneath Her Feet resembles Laloo Yadav, who is involved in ‘goat scam’/ ‘fodder scam’. The novel also refers to the ‘Maruti scam’ and ‘Bofors Cannon scam’ involving Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

Character is elusive in postmodern fiction and lacks depth. Rushdie’s protagonists possess this trait. They have fragmented identities. In Grimus, Flapping Eagle’s identity is at once partial and plural. Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children can merge minds with the one thousand and one minds of Midnight’s Children. His alternative selves link him to various political and cultural conditions within India’s multiplicity. In Shame, Raza Hyder’s mental unity is rendered multiple by the voices of two dead men who haunts his consciousness. In a similar vein, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury have a multiphrenic personality as the protagonist.

Pastiche is another postmodern device to combine, paste together multiple elements. It can be a homage to or a parody to past styles. It is a unique narrative and can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic or information drenched aspects of postmodern society. Rushdie combines elements of films, history, science, technology etc. Different theories intersect and jostle for space. This amalgamation of different genres forges a new aesthetics.

Rushdie experiments with language. He is a word maker, creative user of language. His analytical phraseology and innovative use of language reflects self- conscious, self-reflexive method of writing.

Thus, the book highlights that postmodern fiction and more so Rushdie’s fiction is concerned with:

1. A preoccupation with viability of systems and representations.

2. The decentring of the subject and the inscription of multiple fictive selves.

3. Narrative fragmentation, narrative reflexivity and narratives which doubleback on their own pre-suppositions.

4. An open-ended play with formal divides challenging the pre-suppositions of literary realism.

5. Abolition of the cultural divide between high and popular forms of culture, embracing all in a mélange.

6. The displacement of the real by simulacra in Baudrillardian sense.

7. Incredulity towards the meta-narratives as Lyotard puts it.

All these postmodern strategies employed by Rushdie render his works complicated and hence needs reanalysis, which I suppose the book has done to some extent.

Writing the present book coerced me to dwell on various aspects of Postmodernism that has engulfed us completely and altered our perceptions of viewing the world. It has inspired new thoughts and radically changed my mode of contemplation.

On aspect of this whole endeavour is the immense satisfaction I have experienced in reading and re-reading Salman Rushdie’s novels. However, I do not claim that the present study has either exhausted these works or even done them justice, but I do consider it a great privilege to explore them in depth. Writing this book was like walking a tight rope, trying to maintain a balance between not intruding too much into Postmodern Theory and not focusing completely on aesthetic aspects of Rushdie’s work either. Achieving this task provided me great pleasure and satisfaction.

Dr Shaikh Suhel

Asst Professor in English

Sir Sayyed College of Arts, Comm & Science,

Aurangabad.

POSTMODERNISM

Salman Rushdie is now ranked among the best contemporary novelists of the world. His postmodern, playful ruminations on religion and politics made Islamic literalists issue a decree or ‘fatwa’ on him. Born on the eve of India’s declaration of independence, he was raised in a turbulent time of hectic political activity. He obtained his literary cue from what he had observed of political authority and questioned the powerful role of the author, intermixing various literary styles and genres in order to fragment authorial voice and reveal its underpinnings.

The fiction of Salman Rushdie has now been examined and analysed from a variety of perspectives. It contains many embedded layers…. and multiple plots [CES 24.2, 2002: 60] which render Rushdie as the most complicated writer. As William Walsh observes:

Combining the elements of magic and fantasy, the grimmest realism, extravagant farce, multi-mirrored analogy and a potent symbolic structure, Salman Rushdie has captured the astonishing energy of novel unprecedented in scope, manner and achievement in the hundred and fifty year old tradition of the Indian novel in English. [ed. Ford 1983:258]

The book brings to the forefront the specific features of Postmodernism as practiced in the litearay arts. It puts up the argument on the basis of theoretical paradigms presented by critics as Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. It examines the fictional corpus of Salman Rushdie in the light of postmodernist theoretical formulations and intends to exemplify Rushdie as a postmodern writer.

The concept of postmodern, postmodernism and postmodernity are interrelated. Broadly post-modernity is used in two different ways, one to describe a state of being or a condition of life, which is its use in philosophy or critical theory, and the other to describe a particular period in the arts, particularly in architecture. Many theorists view postmodernity as a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of the modernist project and which consist of cultural activities loosely identified with the industrial revolution, or the Enlightenment project. Lyotard understands modernity as a cultural condition characterized by constant change in the pursuit of progress and postmodernity as the representation of the culmination of this process. Frederick Jameson and David Harvey have identified post-modern period with late capitalism or flexible accumulation: that is, the stage of capitalism following ‘finance capitalism’. This stage of capitalism is characterized by a high degree of mobility of labor and capital, and what Harvey called time and space compression. Jurgen Harbermas contend that postmodernity represents a resurgence of counter-enlightenment ideas.

Postmodernity can be said to have passed through two distinct phases: the first phase beginning in the 1950’s and running through the end of the Cold War, where analog dissemination of information produced limits on the width of channels, and encouraged a few authoritative media channels, and the second beginning with the emergence of cable television, internetworking and the end of the Cold War.

The first phase of postmodernity overlaps the end of modernity and is considered as being part of the modern period. The period saw the rise of television as the primary news source, the decreasing importance of manufacturing in the economics of western Europe and the United States, the increase of trade volumes within the developed core. There was opposition to the Algerian war and the Vietnam war; to laws which overtly discriminated against women, and restricted access to divorce. The era was marked by excessive use of marijuana and hallucinogens and the emergence of pop culture styles of music and drama, including rock music. The ubiquity of stereo, television and radio helped make these changes visible to the broader cultural context.

The second phase of postmodernity saw the increasing power of persons and digital means of communication, including fax machines, modems, cable, and eventually high speed internet. This led to the creation of the new economy whose supporters argued that the dramatic fall in information costs would alter society fundamentally. The simple demarcation point is the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of China. For a period of time it was believed that this change ended the need for an overarching social order, which was called The End of History. Internetworking has altered the condition of postmodernity dramatically: digital production of information allows individuals to manipulate virtually every aspect of the media environment from the source code of their computers, to the wikipedia project itself.

Postmodernity can be described as the historical, political, economic and social condition. However, postmodernism is the movement in arts, culture, philosophy, politics. It is the intellectual, philosophical and theoretical enterprise that seeks to understand and explain the state of postmodernity. It consciously responds to postmodern conditions, or seeks to move beyond or critique modernity.

Postmodernism refers to a wide range of things and phenomenon. It is a highly exasperating and confusing term. No single definition of postmodernism is enough. Hans Bertens points out that:

Postmodernism, then, means and has meant different things to different people at different conceptual levels, rising from humble literary-critical origins in the 1950s to a level of global conceptualization in the 1980s. The result was, and still is, a massive but also exhilarating confusion that has given important new impulses to and opened new territories for intellectual exploration. If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the wildest sense. [Bertens 1995:11]

It can be said that there is no postmodernism, but postmodernisms. However the common trait in all these postmodernisms is the crisis in representation.

Postmodernism, thus, is a philosophical and theoretical position that prioritizes the local rather than the universal, differences rather than similarities, resistance rather than conformity, the temporal and a state of flux rather than permanence and stability, and hybridity rather than purity. It induces the ‘play’ of meanings, the contingent nature of all political, ethical decisions, and the narrativist and discursive nature of ‘history’.

The State of Postmodernity:

There are certain assumptions in postmodern theory which explain the state of postmodern condition or postmodernity. These assumptions may help in understanding postmodernism in general, and postmodern literature in particular.

Postmodernism celebrates fragmentation and anarchy. As Patricia Waugh comments:

Fragmentation and dehumanization are part of a ‘postmodern’ assault on the bondage of thought to regulative ideals such as ‘unity and ‘truth’. [Waugh 1992:192]

Postmodernism denies any notion, philosophy or idea of a general, universal kind and evinces an obvious distrust towards claims about truth and ethics. Utopian ideals of universally applicable truths or aesthetics pave way for provisional, decentred, local petit recites which, rather than referencing and underlying universal