Rushdie's Shame: Postmodernism, Migrancy and Representation of Women

Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad

Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 24 (Jun. 15, 1991), pp. 1461-1471
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4398093
Accessed: 22/10/2008 18:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=epw.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Economic and Political Weekly is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Economic and Political Weekly.

http://www.jstor.org
 SPECIAL ARTICLES

Rushdie's Shame: Postmodernism, Migrancy

and Representation
of Women
Aijaz Ahmad
Theessentialtask of ThirdWorldnovels,it is said, is to give appropriateform to the nationalexperienceand
the rangeof questionsthat may be askedof these textsmustpredominantlyreferto this experience.Consequently
other kinds of questions have to be subordinatedto the primacy of the authorisedquestions.It is with these
other questions that the present essay is primarilyconcerned.
Focusingmore narrowlyon the politics of readingindividualtexts the essay examinesSalmanRushdie'sbook
Shame. The author'spurpose is to offer a symptomaticreadingof an ideologicallocation and in this context
the essay locates the ideologicalunderpinningsof Rushdie'sworkprincipallyin the high cultureof modernism
and postmodernism.
THE axiomatic fact about any canon for- in motion as the art of the 20th century, to the primacyof the authorisedquestions,
mation, even when it initiallytakes shape as however,what came after it could only be about 'nation'etc. It is with theseotherques-
a counter-canon, is that when a period is seen in relation to jt (i e, it qould only be tions that the present essay shall be, in the
derined and homogenised, or the desired a post-of modernismitself).The hegemonic main, occupied.
literarytypology constructed, the canonis- manoeuvrewas evident, further,in the fact
ing agency selects certain kinds of authors, that any text which aspired to be included
texts,styles,and criteriaof classificationand in the category of 'what came after' had
judgment, privileging them over others (a) to have enough of modernism within it I havereferredelsewhereto the greatpro-
which may also belong in the same period, and (b) also to divergesufficiently in a new fixity and heterogeneityof culturalpiroduc.
arisingout of the same space of production, avant-gardistway. In either case, processes tions in our spaces,' both of the archival
but which manifestly fall outside the prin- of canon formationmeant also that certain and the non-archivablekinds, which simp-
ciples of inclusion enunciated by that self- kinds of questions could not-nowbe asked. ly exceed the theoretical terms of 'Third,
same agency; a certain kind of dominance One could not read a modernist or Worldliterature'. Here,I wantto look briefly
is asserted and fought for, in other words, postmodernistnarrativefromthe standpoint at only one author-Salman Rushdie-who.
and is in turn defined as the essential and of realism,for example,withoutbeingguilty occupies a distinguished place at the very
the dominant. The history of modernismis of Derrida's famous 'metaphysic of apex of 'ThirdWorldliterature',and at one
significant in this regard.It was the moder- presence'. The subordinating or even of his books-Shame-which has already
nist avant-gardeitself which first posited foreclosingof certainkindsof questions,the become something of a classic of this'
modernism as a comprehensive negation, foregrounding of others, is the essential counter-canon.What happensto one's own
both formal and philosophical, of the canonising gesture. reading, I would be curious to know, if one
canonical realism of 19th century Europe, Analogous proceduresof privilegingcer- changes,in any appreciabledegree,the ques-
and claimed, moreover, that realism itself tain kindsof authors,texts,genresand ques- tions? Aside from changing the questions
had been definitively broken, superseded tions seem to be underway now with regard somewhat,my main interestin undertaking
and buriedin the periodof high modernism, to 'ThirdWorldliterature.The essentialtask this exercise is not to attempt a sufficient
the quartercentury before 1940 let us say. of a 'ThirdWorld'novel, it is said, is to give readingof either the author or the book, in
In turn, the triumph of modernism is in- appropriateform (preferablyallegory, but some radicalisedversionof New Criticaleti-'
dicatedtoday preciselyin the fact that realist epic also, or fairy tale, or whatever)to the quettes, but, rather,to offer a symptomatic
texts producedduring that same period and national experience.The rangeof questions reading of an ideological location which
in the same Euro-Americanspaces now find that may be askedof the textswhich arecur- makes it possible for Rushdie to partake,
no signiflcantplace in the literarycurriculae rently in the process of being canonised equally, of the postmodernistmoment aild
and critical discourses pertaining to that within this categoricalcounter-canonmust the counter-canonof 'Thi Worldliteraure.
period and place, regardlessof the number, predominantly refer, then, in one way or For, there now appears to be, in the work
the worth or the social influence of such another, to representationsof colonialism, of the metropolitancritical avant-garde,an
texts in their own time. And, it is the nationhood, post-coloniality, the typology increasingtie between postmodernismand
hegemonic self-representation of moder- of rulers, their powers, corruptions, etc. ThirdWorldistcanonisations.Thus, for ex-'
nisin as an utter negation of realismwhich Thereis no gainsayingthe fact that these are ample,whetherwe look at the literarycritics
makesit virtuallyimpossiblenowto see how among the greatquestionsof the age. What who havedone the most productiveand in-
manykindsof modernistnarrativity,Kafka's is disconcertingneverthelessis that a whole fluential work on this idea of a generic dif-
for example, have been facilitated by the range of texts which do not ask, in any ference between 'the West' and the 'Third
machineriesof representationdevelopedin foregroundedmanner,those particularques- World' or at the actual authors who are
19thcentury Europe.This canonical status tions would then have to be excluded from accorded central importance in this evolv-
of modernism seems to be at work even in or pushed to the margins of this emerging ing counter-canon-Garcia Marquez,
relationto what has now come to be known counter-canon.Worsestill, a whole rangeof Fuentes, Rushdie,among others-we find,
as postmodernism.As everyoneknows,there other kinds of questionings-pertaining to first, that these criticalpositions are framed
were all sorts of distinct movements- other sorts of literary influences and ex- by the cultural dominance of postmoder-
Imagism,Surrealism,Dada, Cubism,and so perientiallocations,the politicalaffiliations nism itself, and, second,that thereis enough'
on-during the period which later came to of the author,representationsof classes and in the authorsupon whom criticalattention
be canonised under the unified rubric of genders within the text, and myriad such is so trainedwhich is appropriablefor those
modernism.Once that categoryhad been set issues-would then haveto be subordinated sorts of readings,usuallywith the text'sown

Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991 1461

abundant complicity. The recurrent pre-
ference for Marquez over Asturias, for ex-
ample, has always appeared to me to be
essentially a political matter,which reflects
the greaterformal and political availability
of Marquez (as against Asturias) for post-
modernist appropriationson the one hand,
and, on the other, the politics of avant-
gardist literarytaste in our time. The same
predominanceof postmodernist etiquettes
of reading is palpably present in other
cognate sub-disciplines that are evolving
alongside 'Third World literature',as the
roster of those who undertake 'colonial
discourse analysis' would amply show. Nor
is this sqbjection of the so-called 'Third
World' text to postmodernist scrutiny
something reserved for the best known; it
now appears to be a fairly general tenden-
cy. FredricJamesonoccupiesa differentand
distinctive position in all this because of
(a) his arduous attempts to combine post-
modernismwith Marxism,(b) his identifica-
tion of 'ThirdWorldliterature'with 'naive'
realism and, fartherback, specifically with
allegory, and (c) his upholding of 'Third
World literature' as a global other of
postmodernismitself, under the insignia of
'nationalism.What is remarkableevenin his
readings,differentand superioras they are,
is that he too is preoccupied,whenone looks
at the totality of his 'mapping',with defin-
ing a relation between 'Third World
literature'and the 'global Americanculture
of postmodernism. For most other critics,
even the problem of this relation hardly
exists. What we find, instead, in most cases,
is that postmodernism, in one variant or
another, has been imbibed already as the
self-evidentpoliticsand procedure,and what
remains to be done is the selection, ap-
propriation and interpretationof the texts
that are to be includedin, or excludedfrom,
the emergingcounter-canonof 'ThirdWorld
literature'.It is in this space of overlapthat
Salman Rushdiemakes,most forcefully,his
mark.
That the author himself wants his three
major novelsthus far (Grimusis minor and,
in some fundamental ways, both obscure
and different) to be read as 'Third World'
texts is made obvious enough in the main
lines of thematics and plotting, and in the
emphases that Rushdie has underscored
whenever he has spoken in his own voice,
whetherwithinthe novelsor in the in,terviews
and conferencepaperswhichhaveinevitably
followed:the colonial determinationof our
modernity, the conditions and coryuptions
of post-coloniality,the depiction of the Zia
and Bhutto periods in Pakistan as emble-
matic of ThirdWorldcaudillosand dictators.
in general, myths of nationhood and iF*
dependence, the myths and gods of India,
ThirdWorldmigrantsin metropolitancities,
the world of Islam, and so on. The forms
of narrativisation, meanwhile, are diverse
enough for critics to conjecture that they
belong, in essence, to a generally non-
Western, specifically Indian form of non-
mimetic narration,derived,finally,from the
1462
Ramayan and the Mahabharat which ex-
emplify, in the words of Raja Rao, the
characteristically Indian penchant for
obsessive digressions and the telling of an
interminable tale. This is of course what
Rushdie'sown stancein Midnight'sChildren
is. It has not been possible, though, to sus-
tain this idea of quintessential Indian-ness
in the form of Rushdie's narrativetechni-
ques; the lines of descent from European
modernism and postmodernism are too
numerous.The necessarythough often un-
intendedconsequenceof theseapproaches-
i e, the preoccupation with Rushdie'spor-
trayalof 'the nation' and 'the Third World'
on the one hand; with the digressive self-
reflexivity ('Indian-ness'?)of his narrative
technique on the other-has been the
obscuringof his ideologicalmooringsin the
high culture of the modern metropolitan
bourgeoisie as well as the suppressionof a
whole range of questions which have little
to do with either 'the nation', or 'the Third
World'but which I take to be quite central
to the basic import of his narratives.
The more fundamental questions shall
become clearer as we get to the reading of
the novel, but two featuresof the ideological
subtextitself may be mentionedherein pas-
sing, so as to illustratethe generalambience
of the work. Thus, Rushdie's idea of
'migrancy', for example, which is quite
central to his self-representationboth in
fiction and in life, has come to us in two
versions. In the first version, fully present
in Shame and in the writings that came at
more or less that same time, 'migrancy'is
given to us as an ontological condition of
all human beings while the 'migrant'is said
to have 'floated upwardfrom history'.In the
second version,articulatedmore fully in the
more recent writings, this myth of ontolo-
gical unbelonging is replaced by another,
largermythof excess of belongings:not that
he belongs nowhere but that he belongs to
too many places. This is one kind of thrust
in Rushdie'swork, which appearsto referto
the social condition of the 'Third World'
migrantbut is repletealso with echoes from
both the literary tradition of high moder-
nism and the postmodernistphilosophical
positions. But then, alongside this issue of
'migrancy'we also find in Shame an actual
portrayal of Pakistan-and, in Rushdie's
own words,'morethan Pakistan' as a space
occupied so entirely by power that there is
no space left for either resistance or its
representation;whoever claims to resist is
enmeshedalreadyin relationsof powerand
in the logic of all-embracingviolences. This
one can see in numerousminor episodes of
the novel, such as the breezy caricatureof
the armed movement in Baluchisian in the
1970c, in the earlier portions of the book,
as much as in the fabricationof the central
charater, Sufia Zinobia, as we shall seek to
demonstratebelow.Betweenthese two poles
of ideologicalconstruction-the individuai's
freedom,absoluteand mythic,that is derived
from the fact that he belongs. nowhere
because he belongs everywhere;and an im-
Economic and Political Weekly
age of the publicsphereof politicsso replete
with violence and corruption that any
representation of resistance becomes
impossible-Rushdie encompasses, in fact,
a whole range of nuances which clearly do
not constitute a philosophical unity but
which are the very nodal points through
which the contemporary (post)modernist
literaryimagination passes as it negotiates
its way out of Pound and Elict, into the
world of Derrida and Foucault. How very
enchanting, I haveoften thought, Rushdie's
kind of imaginationmust be for that whole
rangeof readerswho have been brought up
on the peculiar 'universalism'of The Waste
Land(the 'Hindu'traditionappropriatedby
an Anglo-Americanconsciousness.onits way
to Anglican conversion, through the agen-
cy of orientalistscholarship)and the 'world
culture' of Pound's Cantos (the sages of
ancient China jostling with the princely
notables of renaissance Italy, with Homer
and Cavalcantiin between,all in the service
of a political vision framed by Mussolini's
fascism)- one did not have to belong, one
could simply float through, effortlessly,
through a supermarket of packaged and
commodified cultures, ready to be con-
sumed. This idea of the availability of all
culturesof the world for consumptionby an
individual consciousness was of course a
much older European idea, growing in
tandem with the history if colonialism as
such, but the perfection and extended use
of it in the very fabrication of modernism
(not just Poundand Eliot, but a whole range
of modernists, from Herman Hesse to St
John Perse) signalled a real shift, from the
age of old.colonialism per se to the age of
modern imperialism proper, which was
reflected also in the daily lives of the
metropolitan consumers in a new kind of
shopping: the supermarket.In the literary
imaginationof high modernismthis idea of
culturalexcessserved,however,as a counter-
point against the far less sanguine notion
that the fragmentedself was the only truly
modernself. Ideasof excessand disruption,
of unityand fragmentation,wereheid in this
imagination in a tense balance. If the chief
characteristic of the metropolitan super-
market was tnat entirely diverse products
(utensils, fabrics, jewellery refrigerators,
beds) could now be purchased under one
roof, while also drawingupon the resources
of different countries (Indian textiles
alongside Manchester woollens; Persian'
carpets alongside Frenchhosiery), making
availablea wide rangeof personalconsump-
tions in a wholly Impersonalsetting, the felt
experience of the elite artist was that he
could now draw upon a whole range of
cultural artefacts from the whole world
(Indian philosophy, African masks,
Cambodiansculpture)but he was also sub-
jected to those same processesof capitalist
alienation which 'wereinscribed now not
only in the processes of production, to be
suffered by the working class alone, but in
the very structureof social space as it was
reconstitutedin the moderncity.The collige,
June 15, 1991
 and the Cubist recompositions of perspec-
tive wee the characteristicresponsesin the
viswa arts, and Eliot'souvrecame to occupy
so centrala position in the literaryimagina-
tion of the Anglo-Saxon elite-and, in an
act of characteristicsubordination, in the
imagination of the Anglophone colonial
elite as well-because he combinedthis sense
of culturalexcess with an equally strong in-
vocations bf 'Hollow Men' and 'Unreal
City!'; The WasteLand, with its fragmented
surface, its polyglot ascription, its multi-
culturallist of literaryresourceand ideolo-
gical possibility, its malevolence toward
workingwomenand the sexualityof popular
classes, its aristocraticaffiliation, its dazzl-
ing technicalresolution for the sense of un-
belonging and inner ennui, is of course the
zentraldocument of Anglo-Saxon moder-
iism. In none of the major modernists,
owever,was the idea of the fragmentedself,
)r the accompanyingsense of un-belonging,
evera source of any great comfort; it came,
usually, with a sense a recoiling, even some
terror. What is new in the contemiporary
metropolitan philosophies and literary
ideologies,whichhavearisensincethe 1960s,
in tandem with vastly novel re-structurings
of global capitalistinvestments,communica-
tion systems and information networks-
not to speak of actualtravellingfacilities-is
that the idea of belonging is itself being
abandoned as antiquated false conscious-
ness. The terrorsof high modernism at the
prospect of inner fragmentationand social
disconnection have now been stripped, in
Derridean strands of postmodernism, of
their tragicedge, pushingthat experienceof
loss, instead, in a celebratorydirection;the
idea of belonging is itself seen-now as bad
faith, a mere 'mythof origins',a truth-effect
produced by the Enlightenment's 'meta-
physic of presence'.The truth of being, to
the extentthat truth is at all possible,resides
now in multiplicityof subjectpositions and
an excess of belonging; the writer not only
has all culturesavailableto him as resource,
for consumption,but he actuallybelongs in
all of them, because he belongs in none. As
these formulations begin to become the
manifestcommon sense of the metropolitan
intelligentsia, dutifully reproduced in the
fiteraryproductionsand pronouncementsof
'Third World intellectuals' located within
that milieu,one wonderswhat these cultural
positions-(the idea of origin being a mere
'myth'; the double-ness of arriving at an
excess of belonging by not belonging; the
project of mining the resource and raw
material of 'Third World literature'for ar-
chival accumulationand generic classifica-
tion in the metropolitanuniversity)-might
have to do with this age of late capitalism
in which'themost powerfulcapitalistfirms,
originating in particular imperialist coun-
tries but commanding global investments
and networksof transportand communica-
tion, proclaim themselves nevertheless as
being multi-nationals and trans-nationals,
as if their originsin the.UnitedStatesor the
FederalGerman Republicwas a mere myth
. Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991
and as if theirabilityto accumulatesurplus-
value from a dozen countries or more was
none other than an excess of belonging.
If Derrideanpressuresmove postmoder-
nism in the direction of a self-reflexive
celebration (one is free to choose any and
all subject-positions-beyond all structure
and all system,in EdwardSaid'sformulation
-because history has no subjectsor collec-
tive projects jn any case), the political im-
plications of Foucault'sphilosophical posi-
tion and narrativestructuretend not only
to re-inforce the impossibility of stable
belonging and subject-positionbut also to
bestow upon the worlda profoundcage-like
quality,with a bleak sense of humanentrap-
ment in discourses of power which are at
once discrete and overlapping, many of
which appear to be located in the archaeo-
logical layerings of the countless passages
from the ancien regime to modernity while
others (the discourse of sexuality, for ex-
ample) in perhaps Roman antiquity, but
there appearsto be none that can be traced
to an origin or.a purposeor an interest.This
history without systemic origins or human
subjects or collective sites is neverthelessa
history of all-encompassingpower,which is
wielded by none and which tannot be
resistedbecausethereis nothing outside the
fabrications of power-perhaps ought not
be resistedbecause it is not only repressive
but also profoundlyproductive.History, in
other words, is not open to change, only to
narrativisation.Resistancecan only be pro-
visional, personal, local, micro, and
pessimistic in advance. The enormous ar-
chivaldepth of Foucault'sresearchesand the
sumptuousnessof his prose, we might add,
stand in a peculiarrelationto this definition
of human possibility,as if the recoveryand
re-definitionof the archivewere,in the old
humanistsenseof the intellectual'svocation,
a fundamentally redemptiveact, and as-if
Foucaulttoo believed,along with Whitehead
for example, that style was the essential
morality of a writer's mind.
I do not mean to suggest that Shame is
somehow a fictional fabrication derived
from these sets of ideas which the author
then appliesto the social realitythat engages
his attention. Nor is it of any importance
whetherRushdiehas even readany or all of
these other authors (though some phrases
in Shame aredoubtlessmodelledon phrases
from The Waste Land). What I wish to
specify, rather,is the context of the book's
composition as well as reception: the kind
of author Rushdie is, the whole grid of
predispositions which have gone into the
making of such an imagination, the kinds
of pleasureshis book supplies to what was
conceivedof as its initialreadership(Rushdie
himself tells us that he wished desperately
to win a second Booker Prize, with Shame,
as he had done with Midnight's Children).
In some basic ways, one is speaking not so
much of Rushdies intentions as of the con-
ditions of his production, the very satura-
tion of his thought as it were. It is impor-
tant to recallherethat Rushdiewas not, until
his recent and macabre sentencing by the
Ayatollah, an exile but a self-exile. Now,
writers-in-exile often write primarily for
readershipswhicharemateriallyabsentfrom
the immediate conditions of their produc-
tion, presentonly in the countryfrom which
the writerhas been forciblyexiled, hence all
the more vividly and excruciatinglypresent
in the writer'simaginationbecausetheir ac-
tualityis deeplyintertwidedwith the existen-
tial suffering of exile and with the act of
writing as such. The self-exile has no such
irrevocablebond; he is free to choose the
degreeof elasticityof that bonding, and the
material consequences of his migrancy
necessarilybring him into a much more ac-
countablerelationwith the readershipwhich
is materiallypresentwithinthe milieuof his
productivework. This one recognisesnot as
a weaknessor a strengthof Rushdie'swork
but simply as one of its framing realities.
This sharedambiencebetweenthe writerand
his primaryreadershipmay then be reinforc-
ed, or not, by ties, or lack of them, that are
normally produced by one's own culture,
one's own class and the range of choices
whicharethen availableand whichone exer-
cises, for better or worse, in the process of
living and writing.
I shall return briefly to these particular
moorings and the broader implications of
Rushdie'swork in the concludingsection of
the present essay. Before going on any
furtherwith such generalisation,however,I
want to look more closely at some aspects
of Shame so as to clarify how these larger
issue are embeddedin the text of the novel
itself. In the process, I shall offer some
remarks on Rushdie's self-representation
within the book, some more extended
remarkson his representationof women in
it, and on the implications of these, and of,
both his 'migrancy'as well as his postmoder-
nist allegiances, for his politics. The inten-
tion is not to offer a more adequateor even
an alternativereadingof eitherShameor the
rest of his growingcorpus, less still to deny
that the condition of postcoloniality may
itself be one of the co-ordinatesfor reading
such books, but simply to illustratethe sort
of questions and connections that get
marginalised in the pursuit of a generic
category of 'Third World literature'.
II
We might as well begin with the author
inside the book. For, aside from the
numerous things Rushdie has said in the
course of his many interviewsabout his in-
tentions in Shame, the narrativewithin the
book itself is controlledtransparentlyby the
repeated,direct, personal interventionson
part of the narrator-who is, for purposes
of our interpretation,Rushdiehimself. The
first such intervention comes early in the
book, as soon as the author is throughwith
his first chapter.After a significantdescrip-
tion of his theme-Shame, and what causes
it-he comes to himself, his boQk, his
country:
1463
 I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetak-
ing, my last words on the East from which,
many years ago, I began to come loose. I do
not always believe when I say this. It is a part
of the world to which, whether I like it or
not, I am still joined, if only by elastic
bonds.2
And:
The country in this story is not Pakistan, or
got quite. There are two countries, real and
fitonal, occupying the same space, or
almost the same space. My story, my fictional
country exists, like myself, at a slight angle
to reality. I have found this off-centring to
be necessary... I am not writing only about
Pakistan.
Then, after a short passage on Khayyam,
the Farsi poet, we are told:
I too, am a translatedman. 1 have been borne
across. (p 24; emphasis in the original)
Later in the novel, in the course of a poig-
nant passage about his younger sister,
Rushdie would also say, unmistakably about
himself:
Although I have known Pakistan for a long
time, I have never lived there for longer than
six months at a stretch... I have learned
Pakistan by slices... however I choose to
write about over-there, I am forced to reflect
that in fragments of broken mirrors... I
must reconcile myself to the inevitability of
the missing bits (pp 70-71).
And finally:
What is the best thing about migrant peoples
and seceded nations? I think it is their
hopefulness... And what is the worst thing?
It is the emptiness of one's luggage... We
have floated upwards from history, from
memory, from Time.
As we begin to negotiate this imaginative ter-
ritory marked by 'Pakistan'. 'the East',
'seceded nation' etc, it is well to recall what
Rushdie himself tells us in a different
passage: that he had actually gone back to
live in Pakistan but had left not because of
political difficulty or economic pressure but
because he had found the country 'suf-
focating'. With that personal decision to
leave one does not quarrel, because that kind
of decision always is personal. But his
'leavetaking' is so very central to his public
self-representation as well as to the structure
of his fictions that one wants to locate at
least the literary consequences-and
precedents-of it somewhat accurately. With
regard to his fictions and his general political
stance, I think, this personal detail is to be
seen not so much in relation to coloniality
and its aftermath, nor with reference to the
issue of dictatorship per se, but in the highly
pressurising perspective of modernism itself
which has been framed so very largely by
self-exiles and emigres-James and Conrad,
Pound and Eliot, Picasso and Dali, Joyce,
Gertrude Stein, and so on-who had ex-
perienced the same kind of 'suffocation' in
their own spaces of this globe and who were
-subseqently to leave behind immense
resources of genre and vocabulary for
delineating that predominantimage of the
modern artist who lives as a literal stranger
1464
in a foreign and impersonal city, and who,
on the one hand, uses the condition of exile
as the basic metaphor for modernity and
even for the humancondition itself, and, on
the other, wvritesobsessively, copiously of
that veryland which had been declared'suf-
focating'. Nor was 'the East', and the itch
to say some 'last words' about it, far from
the imaginativetopographyof modernism,
and Rushdie seems to have taken as much
fromthe manystylesand ideologiesin which
'the East' had been representedwithin the
largercompass of the modernistmoment-
(the debtsof Midnight'sChildrento Kim are
substantialand Kipling,one might recall,ac-
tually belongs within this moment, as does
Orwell;and Conrad, coming in the middle,
is of course one of the mastersof it)-as he
has taken,on otherscores,fromGarciaMar-
quez. Even the increasinginsistenceon self-
exile as a positively enabling experiencefor
writersis by no means new;what is new and
decidedly postmodernist is the emphasis,
much sharper in Rushdie's more recent
writings,on the idea of multiplebelongings
and on the lack of any fundamentalpain in
dislocating onself from one's original com-
munity. But this too fits, because the cur-
rentmetropolitanmilieu, with its debunking
of any 'mythsof origin'and of 'metaphysics
of presence'does not really authorise any
sustained acknowledgementof such pains.
The remarkablething about the passages
I have quoted above is, in any case, the
handling of ambivalencesand conditiona-
lities. The irony of 'I tell myself', which is
intended so clearly to suggest that what
follows is mereself-persuasion,not the truth
but a hallucination of truth, is poised so
sharply against the powerof that phrase,'a
novel of leavetaking' and poised all the
more sharply because Midnight's Children
and Shame actually are novels of leavetak-
ing, not from 'the East'surelybut, morepar-
ticularly,first from the country of his birth
(India) and then from that second country
(Pakistan)where he tried, half-heartedly,to
settle down and could not-that tone of
initial self-mockerydissolves quickly into a
characteristicallymodernistuse of that par-
ticular kind of irony which comes into
modernism from its antecedents in roman-
ticism itself and which servesto de-stabilise
not only the object of irony but also its
author,and which FrancoMorettihas quite
properlycalled a 'spell of indecision'.There
is a qualityof linguisticquicksandin all such
passages, as if the truth of each utterance
was conditioned by the existence of its op-
posite, and Rushdieseems foreverto be tak-
ing back with one hand what he has given
with the other: the will to take leave is pois-
ed against the impossibility of leavetaking;
he has been coming loose but is still 'join-
ed'; he is still joined but only by 'elastic'
bonds, and he is not sure that he likes the
fact of continued joining (joined, 'whether
I like it or not'); he makes statements, but
he does not believe in them; the fictive and
the real co-exist but do not correspond;not
only his textbut he, himself,exists'ata slight
Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991
angle to reality'; not his text but he is
'translated','borne across'; the translation
occurs not on the semantic but on the exis-
tentiallevel.These ambivalencespropelhim,
then, to writea 'novelof leavetaking',about
a country which is 'not quite Pakistan'and
'not only Pakistan' but is, in the most ob-
vious ways, Pakistan. And the novel is
somethingelse as well:'my last wordson the
East'! An audacious undertakIngindeed,
wider in some senses than Joyce's in A
Portraitof the Artist As a YoungMan, the
book which I think Rushdie quite inten-
tionally invokes and where Stephen, the
alter-egoof that Irish,colonised author had
also set out for self-exile so that, as he puts
it in the concluding passages of that other
book of leavetaking,"I may learnin my own
life and away from home and friends what
the heart is and what it feels" and 'to forge
in the smithy of my soul the uncreatedcon-
science of my race'.
There is poignancy in them surely, but
Rushdie'sformulationshereare troublingon
at least swo counts. One is that it is always
impossible,even in a work much largerthan
Shame,-to say one's 'last words' about
anything as amorphous as 'the East'; this
idea, that thereis some unitarything called
'the East' about which some 'last words'can
be said is a figment of the orientalists' im-
agination,and Rushdieis simplyover-stating
at least his capacities if not also his inten-
tions. That he beginsthe passagewith a sug-
gestion of self-mockery does not really
retrievethe banal characterof the assertion,
since the whole book is repletewith all sorts
of banal statements about 'the East', in-
cluding the assertion that the English word
'Sharle' falls far short of the Urdu word
'Sharam'because the latter is, as sentiment
and notion and normativeconduct, charac-
teristically Eastern, hence exceeding the
Western capacities of cognition and
linguistic formation; 'they' live after the
death of tragedy, we are told, while 'we'
presumablylive in the grip of it. Second,
there are remarkable contrasts between
Rushdie'sdeclarationsand the phrasesI have
used fromJoyce'slittle workof earlymoder-
nism. Thereis in the youngJoycestill a sense
of 'home and friends".and even an accom-
panying sense of desolation in having to
choose self-exile;thereis also an intentiona-
lity, a choice howevertragic,as well as a full-
blooded ironyabout one's own undertaking
and about the kind of rhetoric which fre-
quently accompanies such undertakings;
remarkablein all this is the pun on the word
'forge';nor is thereany sense that the writer
has 'floated upwards from history, from
memory,fromTime. Rushdie'sstanceis dif-
ferent Pakistan,or India for that matter,is
preciselynot home; neitherthe joining nor
the coming loose has, by now, with Mid-
night'sChildrenbehind him, the immediacy
of a willedand necessaryself-woundingthat
may requirethe languageof ironand smithy;
what we have, instead, is an image of
tenuous and possiblEy flaccid rubber,'elasti-
city'; and what impressesone about '1, too,
am a translated man. I have been borne is even more significant than the attitude is both productiveand, for the reader,very
towards (self-)exile in these passages is the.
across' is that someone or something else, moving. The structure of this limited
connection in Rushdie's utterances between
perhaps Flistory itself, appears to be doing knowledge,circumscribedas it is within the
(a) the project of saying some 'last words on
the translating, the bearing across. It is experienceof a decadent class to which he
the East'. (b) the ambition to write at one
perhaps the lightness of being that comes is joined by originbut fromwhichhe himself
and the same time about Pakistan and also
from having 'floated upwards from history, feels wholly alienated, only confirms,
from memory, from Time' which makes it more than Pakistan ('the East' on the one however, the world-view implied in his
possible for the author, then, to mock hand, the typology of dictatorships on the already-existingaffiliationswith modernism
other, as well as post-coloniality in general);
himself into wanting to say his 'last words and postmodernism.Neitherthe class from
(c) the sketchiness of the actual knowledge
on the East, in a parody of the flip con- which the Pakistani segment of his ex-
of Pakistan, and (d) the device of 'off-
fidence that one would encounter later in perience is derived, nor the ideological
Naipaul's Anmong the Believers. (Sataniccentring'. His declaration, furthermore, that ensemble within which he has located his
Verses perhaps can be read more ap- he has 'learned Pakistan by slices' and must own affiliatiorns,admits,in any fundamental
therefore reconcile himself 'to the inevit-
propriately as Rushdie's version of the world degree,the possibility of heroic action; bet-
ability of the missing bits', and to reflecting
Naipaul there describes, with far greater ween the structureof felt experienceand the
both the known and the not-known 'in
talent and knowing effect but with very un- politico-literaryaffiliation, thus, the circle
fragments of broken mirrors', is at once a
canny overlap of stances.) As one returns is closed. What this excludes 'the missing
defence, very early in the book, before the
from that phrase, 'last words on the East', bits' to which he must 'reconcilehimself-is
reader has engaged with the greater part of
to Stephen's 'in the smithy of my soul the the dailinessof lives lived underoppression,
the narrative, against the anticipated
uncreated conscience of my race', one senses and the human bonding-of resistance,of
criticism that there is much missing from this
the impossibility of that 'floating upward' decency, of innumerableheroisms both of
judgment of the 'last words', as well as a
for anyone, migrant or not, who might have the ordinaryand the extraordinarykinds-
thought of 'migrancy' as personal need, positioning of the author which has both a which makes it possible for large numbers
formal and a political import. The contessed
because of the 'suffocation', but pmightbe of people to look each other in the eye,
yet unwilling to make a fetish of his ownfragmentariness of the experience precludes, without guilt, with affection and solidarity
un-belonging. for example, the realist option, because what and humour, and which makes life, even
realism presumes, at the very least, is an
P'arenthetically, I may emphasise that I do unideroppression,endurableand frequently
integral experience which includes more than
not w,ish to construe this juxtaposition of joyous.Of that otherkindof life his fictions,
mere 'slices'. The narrativisation of 'slices',
two texts, or rather the two sets of brief rightup to Satanic Verses,seem to be largely
in the form of 'fragments of broken mirrors'
quotations, as some kind of fixed difference ignorant;what his imaginationmakesof the
between modernism and postmodernism. If (the echo from The Waste Land here is, I subsequent experiences we shall only find
think, intentional), only refurbishes the
a postmodernist at all, Rushdie is so precise- out from later work. The infinite bleakness
author's prior disposition toward modernism
ly in tie sense tha4 his intellectual and ar- of Shame, its cage-likequality,is rooted, in
and postmodernism, i e, views of; the world
tistic formation is essentially modernist but other words, in what it excludesas much as
which would serve to further validate the
there are distinct articulations and emphases what it actually is comprised of.
ontological primacy of the fragment.
in which he clearly exceeds that basic for-
mation. I am reminded here of those But thle matter of the 'missing bits' is not II1
passages in Lyotard where he argues that so easily settled, purely as a problem beg-
ging for a formal resolution. It is at least
postmodernism is a set of tendencies within Virtuallyeveryonehas noted, as Rushdie
late modernism itself, and which distin- arguable that no one ever knows his coun- himself has, that Shame, which is almost ex-
try whole, regardless of how much of one's
guishes itself primarily by celebrating human clusively about Pakistanalthough a couple
life is or is not actually lived within its
inability to experience reality as a totality, of episodesdo take place in India, is a much
borders; that the imaginative apprehension
over and beyond its fragments. The attitude more severe and despairing book, more
of totality is always constructed on the basis
towards (self-)exile would be another such bleak and claustrophobic, than was Mid-
of those bits and slices of concrete ex-
shift-but a shift connected with historically night's Children.The sense that Pakistanis
distinct moments within the continuum of perience which constitute any individual's a cage is already there, in the opening
life, migrant or not; that what eventually
metropoles' high culture in the century of episodes, wherethe Shakil sisters-the three
modern imperialism. matters about any experience, felt or nar- mothers of the 'peripheral hero'. Omar
rated, is not its partiality, because direct ex-
'The East' would of course continue to Khayyam-are cloisteredtwice over:first by
haunt Rushdie for many years after the perience is always partial, but the quality of their father, the patriarchof the macabre
the particular 'bits' which constitute it and
writing of Shame, right up to the present and mansion,with whose deaththe book begins,
those others which remain outside the felt
most likely into the indefinite future. For one and then by themselves, after their one
thing, self-exile rarely becomes a full experience and therefore outside one's im- hedonistic night in which their son is con-
aginative capacity as well. If one has 'known
naturalisation even when class and culture ceived. And this sense of being trapped
can be fully shared, as even Henry James Pakistan for a long time' and yet, because permeatesthe wh_ie2book, right up to the
of circumstance, 'learned' it only 'by slices',
was to find out. British racism forecloses the final denouement where we find that even
the question naturally arises: which 'slices'
option for people of colour in any case, even dictators cannot cross the 'frontier' and
for a man of Naipaul's longings and iden-has one chosen to 'learn'? For, if we do not escapetheircage. In between,Bilquisis trap-
choose our own 'bits' of reality, those 'bits'
tifications, let alonie tor Rushdie with his ped in her 'elite actressy manner",her sen-
monumental ambivalences about the cultureshall then be chosen for us by our class timentality, her 'horror of movement',her
ot his origins as well as his activist and op-
origin, our jobs, the circuits of our friend- desire for sons and yet her lack of sons, as
ships and desires, our ways of spending our
positional relationship with the culture of well as the crassnessof her husband'sam-
otfficial Britain. The writing of Satanicleisure time, our literary predilections, our bitions, pieties and cruelties; Rani is trap-
political affiliations, or lack of them. There
Verses oni the one hand, and the fundamen- ped, likewise, in her own husband's in-
are no neutral 'bits', not even of not-
talist fury that was unleashed against him fidelitiesand the rise and fall of his political
knowing. What Rushdie seems to know,
thereafter, has madc vivid the non-elasticity career;Sufiya Zinobia-the heroine of the
of those bonds in a particLularlymacabre fromnthe inside, because of his own class book, 'Shame'embodied-is trappedin her
way, which Rushdie himself nevertheless origin, is the history of the corruptions and brainfever,herhumiliation,and hervolcanic
could not have fore.seenat the time when he criminalitiesof Pakistanirulers;about these urge to violence; her younger sister, Good
wrote.Shamze.As regardsjhe readingof that he says remarkablytrenchantthings,and his News Hyder,is a much less substantialbe-
earliernovllOitl its OWJ1 what
setting,however, himself from that history
desire to disjoin,L ing but she too is trapped,first in her super-

Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991 1465

ficiality and then, despite the marriage of Harappa,who is modelledon the personali- hand; the tradition of the grotesque on the
her choice, in the constant demand on her ty of Bhutto,the formerprimeminister.The other-does, however, is that it reads the
problem,evenhere,is that those partsof the
fertility. The younger sister kills herself, the book back from the author's own declara-
book which attempt to create fictional
older kills her tormentors, but the cage never tions and foregroundings,according to eti-
quite becomes anything other than itself. equivalents of the literal facts of recent quettes stipulatedby critics and theoristsof
Pakistani history tend too much toward
We shall return to some of these characters 'Third World literature'.There is, thus, a
presently. But we should first note the con- parody, many of the other parts tend too certaincomplicityof a sharedstarting-point
trast with Midnight's Children, which had much toward burlesque. Both the parody betweenthe authorand his critics,generated
been about India, the country of Rushdie's and the burlesqueare at times delicious, in- very largelyby the very condjtions in which
own cherished childhood. What had given ventive, hilarious, but in re-creating the the idea of a 'Third World literature'has
to that earlier novel its narrative amplitudemajor strands of contemporary history in arisen and which I have tried to specify
was the connection with autobiography- the form of a spoof, and then mixingup this elsewhere.3This complicity inhibits, then;
that baggage of memories that even a spoof with all kinds of spooky anecdotes other sorts of.starting-points: the issue, in
m'igrant, particularly a migrant, must carry.whose symbolic value is sometimes unclear the midst of all the political claims that go
Pakistan, by contrast, is a society Rushdie and often excessive,Rushdie has given us a back and forth betweenauthors and critics,
never knew in those golden years before the Laughterwhich laughs,unfortunately,much of Rushdie'sown politicsand affiliationsfor
uprooting. It is not 'teeming' (Rushdie's too often. The fictional equivalents of example,or his representation of womenand
word for India, borrowed, significantly, fromBhutto and Zia are such perfect, buffoon- the relatedissue of a possible misogyny;or
Kipling) for him with stories, and with the like caricatures,and the manynarrativelines the aesthetic of despair that ensues both
of the political parableare woven so much
plenitude of life, because, as he himself puts from his over-valorisationof unbelonging
around their ineptitude,their vacuity,their
it, he has learned it only in little slices, and ('floating upward') and his own location
because the connection of his own life with personal insecurities and one-upmanships, within the modernisttrajectories,early and
that land 'the new, moth-nibbled land of their sexual obsessions, the absurdities of late, which are more than merely formal.
God". as he calls it-is so very tenuous. It their ambitions and their ends, that one is These other issues are what I want to briefly
is a country which he knows, beyond very in dangerof forgettingthat Bhutto and Zia addrss, but I am concerned here mainly
personal affections, only as a polity, and were in reality no buffoons, but highly with his representationof women, for four
primarily in the grotesqueries of its ruling capableand calculatingmen, whose cruelties reasons:that women occupy so large a por-
class. Within the limits of that knowledge, wereentirelymethodical. It is this tendency tion of all the narrativesin the book; that
the rage that the book conveys is entirely to either completelyindividualisethe moral Rushdiehas himself drawnattention to this
well-founded. The problem is that the ex- failuresof a ruling class (Bhutto, or Zia, or fact in numerousinterviews,congratulating
perience of a certain class-rather, a ruling whoever, is a bad character)or to spread himself for these representations;that the
elite-is presented, in the rhetorical stance them far too widely throughsociety at large issue of misogynyis a centalissue iu any sort
of the book, as the experience of a 'coun- (the country was made wrong;what else do of oppositionalpolitics& and that the absence
try'. Far from being about 'the East' or evenyou expect?), which gives to Rushdie's of any substantialmale figuresfrom among
about 'Pakistan', the book is actually about Laughter,so salutary in some respects, the the oppressedand oppositionalstratain this,
a rather narrow social stratum, so narrow ambience, finally, of the modern cartoon. book-the absence,for example,of the male
in fact that Rushdie himself can portray all It is on this narrative line, and on the sections of workersand peasants, political
the major characters in the book as belong- thematics gathered around it, that most militants, the patriotic intelligentsia-is so
ing to a single family. This plot-device of readingsof Shame have concentrated.And, complete that it is only by analysing his
turning all the antagonists inta relatives iswith reason. If the book is to be located in representationof women that we can obtain
a wonderful technical resolution for reflec- the counter-canon of 'Third World litera- any clue as to what his imaginativerelation
ture', if it is to be read essentially as a
ting the monopolistic structure of dictatorial with all such stratamight in fact be. In other
power and the very narrow social spectrum document of post-coloniality,a myth of the words,Rushdiehas so often declaredhimself
within which this power in Pakistan cir- 'nation', a critique of dictatorship, a fic- a socialist of sorts that it is both legitimate
culates. It also helps him bypass the easy tionalised biographyof the Pakistanistate, and necessaryto see what this book might
liberal dichotomy between military villains a dissent from the politics of partition and look like if we wereto readit from the stand-
and civilian innocents; they are all of the of Islamism,then, surely,that narrative,and point of-no, 'not socialism-simply some
same stripe. The main difficulty arises not all other narrativelines convergingon that determinate energies of an emancipatory
in his portrayal of this structure of power main one, should rightly be the point of project,Xe, not only in its representationof
focus. Who on the left-and not only on the
and cruelty at the apex; this he accomplishes, rulers but also in its representationsof the
on the whole, superbly. The difficulty arisesleft-could dissent from the abuse heaped oppressed.
on the likes of Zia etc? We can take infinite
when this ferocious fable of the state is elid- This is by no means an uncomplicated
ed, again and again, in his own recurrent pleasurein the inventivenessand eloquence undertaking,for Rushdieis not, in the way
rhetoric throughout the book, with a civil of the denunciations which are, because of Orwellalways was, a misogynist, plain and
society which is declared to be co-terminal their justness, our own; because we are simple. Living in the contemporarymilieu
with this state structure, equally deformed alreadypreoccupiedwith the twin myths of of the British left, he has not remained
and irretrievably marked by its purported the 'Third World' and the 'nation', far too untouched by feminism itself, at least in a
many of us are willing to set aside all sorts
civilisation (Islam) and its genetic origin (the cerebralsort of way;and he is clearlyaware,
partition), n.ore catastrophically wounded of things that the book says about women, and quite capable of effective narrativisa-
than even what Naipaul makes out India to minorities,servants,aiXdothers who are not tion, of many kinds of women'soppression
be in his A Wounded Civilisation. The rulers of the ruling class. And, it is the pleasure in our societies.The complicationis of a dif-
and the ruled seem to be joined together, of those wide-rangingdenunciationswhich ferent order, and politically far more
each mirroring the other, in a satanic makes it possible, for The New YorkTimes devastatingthan mere lack of sympathy.It
compact. let us say, to lift the book out of its is only after taking into account that struc-
Thus, the bulk of the narrative is focus- immediatelocation and compare Rushdie's ture of sympathy and the kind of politics
achievementin Shame, in one breath as it
ed on the careers, corruptions, ribaldries and in which it is embedded that one can pro-
rivalries of the two main protagonists in thewere, with Sterne, Swift, Kafka, Matquez, ceed to examine the more central issues in
political arena:RezaHyder,an armyofficer GunterGrass.What this particularangle on his representationof women and then to
whose origins and early careerare quite dif- the book-the primary emphasis on the relate those issues back to the generalityof
ferentfromZia'sbut who comes increasingly representationof the 'ThirdWorld'and the his political posi?ions.
to resemble him, and Iskander ('Isky') condition of postcoloniality on the one Thus, alongside the stories of Isky and

1466 Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991

Reza, which together constitute the main turns out to be at least dislikable,frequently medicalinterventions,or eventhat her mar-
narrativeframe,are the tribulationsof their repugnant. riage would remain sexually unconsum-
wives, Bilquis and Rani. These portraitsare mated,beginsto makea certainsort of sense
drawnfar more sympatheticallythan arethe IV within the availablesocial arrangements;we
portraitsof theirhusbands,and some of the may now preachgreaterliberalityof attitude
most moving episodes in the book are The crux of the matter, however,is the towardsuch haplesscreatures,but the essen-
associated with these women: the episode, characterisationof Sufiya Zinobia, the girl tial social situation remainsintractableand
for example, of the fire at the time of the who was supposed to have been a boy, the the novel simply fails to recover from this
partitionwhich burnsaway'the brocadesof 'miracle which went wrong', the demented eliding of the social into the physiological.
continuity and the eyebrowsof belonging' child who was born blushing, and who is In the course of the novel, moreover,
from Bilquis'vulnerablefemale body, while Shame personified. She is the one who pro- Sufiya's shame comes to refer less and less
she is left with nothing save the 'dopatta ofvides the link between the stark title of the to herself (her femaleness;her mental retar-
honour' in which she wraps herself as an book and its manydisjointed,sprawlingnar- dation) or to her family (which is ashamed
only refuge; and the other episode, toward ratives, and .who is at the centre of that of her on both counts, femalenessand retar-
the end of the book, when Rani,sequestered marriagebetweenshame and shamelessness dation) and gets focused increasinglyat the
once more on her rural estate, takes stock which, the author tells us over and over worldas Sufiyafinds it; she becomes,almost
of her life, and embroiders 18 shawls on again, breedsthe all-envelopingviolence;she literally, the conscience of a shameless
which she traces,in intricaterepresentationalblushes, we are told, not merely for herself world-a principleof honour, so to speak.
design, the debaucheriesand crueltiesof her but also, more consistently,for the world at This too is somewhat problematic, in the
husband'sfull career.Equally powerful are large. In a world of utter evil, where sense that when the complex moral obliga-
those last imagesof Bilquis,whose adult life everythingthat happensshould evokeshame tions of a social conscience are reducedto
startedwith forced,fire-propellednakedness, but where everyone is entirely shameless, the limitingemotivenessof mereshame,and
shroudingherselfat the end, an aged woman Sufiya Zinobia, this Shame personified, is when this shamed conscience is deposited
with defeated dreams, in black veils, so as no merecharacter;she is presentedfromthe with one who is physiologicallyincapableof
to make permanent the distance between outset as the yery embodimentof the prin- intellection and sustained responsibleCon-
herself and the male-dominated world in ciple of redemption, if redemption in this duct, the author precludes,by virtue of the
which she has been caged all her life. altogether unheroic,unscrupulousworld is very terms that he has established, the
Similarly,the episode in which Good News at all possible. possibility that this conscience would be
Hyder hangs herself in order to escape the Initially, of course, her blushes begin at capable of grappling with needs of social
constant,mad demandupon her procreativi- birth, for the simple reasonthat she, like all regeneration,or evenwith the sort of decen-
ty is a moving episode, and it corresponds babies, was expected to be a boy. This un- cy and daily heroismthat countlessordinary
to very real horrorsin our society. Even the ending shame which begins at birth and people are quite capable of. Rushdie says
initial conceptioneofSufiya Zinobia as one houndsall her dayson earthmightwell have overand over again,iwithinthe novelas well
who is strugglingto let the Beast out of the been, in a differentsort of trajectory,an ap- as in the interviewswhichhavefollowed,that
SleepingBeautyis itself in the best traditionpropriatemetaphor for the way a sense of the encounterof shamelessnesswith shame
of grotesque realism. These are all power- fundamentalfemale inadequacy,and shame can only produce violence. Precisely! But
ful images. Both Bilquis and Rani are, as a specificallyfemaleattribute,are sought violence is not in itself capableof regenera-
however,whenall is said and done, and quite to be generated in the social processes of tion, and it is doubtful, Fanon notwithstan-
aside from the insult and neglect they suf- gendering.But then two thingshappen.One ding, that viojence is intrinsically even a
fer at the hands of their husbands, paltry, is that she gets ill, contracting brain fever, cleansing virtue. In other words, the very
shallow creatures themselves, capable of and thus becomes permanently retarded, dialectic-of shamelessnessand shame,and
nothing but chirpy gossip (in 'the elite developingthe brainof a six-yearold at age their condensation in eruptions of violence
actressy manner'), or inertia or, at best, a 19. Now, the problemwith this metaphorof -which governsthe conceptual framework
tawdry affair with the owner of the local mental illness is that the pressuresand pro- of the novelis fundamentallyflawedand the
movie-house.They are not even remotelyas cesses of gendering, which are social and symbolic values which Rushdie assigns to
evil as theirhusbands,and while Bilquisgoes historical in character,and which impose Sufiya Zinobia simply exceed the terms
increasinglyto pieces, Rani at least, in em- upon great many women the possibility of within which he has fashionedher own exis-
broideringher shawls, managesto maintain deformation and incapacity,but which are tence. The double punning in her name-
a sort of dignity.Even hers is the dignity ofopen to resistanceand reversalby women's on the word 'Sufi' and on the name of
resignation,however.In general, moreover, own actions, are given to us in the form of Zainub, the grand daughterof the prophet
what we find is a gallery of women who are a physiological insufficiency on her part, of Islam who is quite central to severalof
either frigid and de-seualised (Arjumand, and the novel thereforebecomes incapable the popular strands derived from Sufic
the virgin ironpants), or demented and of communicatingto us, in whatevergrotes- Islam-is, in context excessive and merely
moronic (the 20-odd years of Zinobia's que forms, the process wherebya woman's prankish.
childhood), or dulled into nullity (Farah), intellectual and emotional abilities may be This becomes clear as soon as one recalls
or drivento despair (Rani, Bilquis), suicide sapped, or regained. We may be charitable the stages in the escalationof her violences.
(Good News Hyder), and sheer surrealin- and not recount here all the ways in which The governing metaphor for these escala-
coherenceand loss of individualidentity(the the fiction of women's physiological in- tions-the Beast emerging from inside the
Shakil sisters). Throughout,,every woman, sufficiency has been mobilised in the past Beauty,while the Beautyherselfis anything
without exception, is representedthrougha and presenthistories of gender politics. At but beautiful in any conventionalsenseis
system of imageries which is sexually over- the very least, however,this shift from the again superbly within the tradition of the
determined;the frustrationof erotic need, social to the physiological forecloses the grotesque,and the political idea which is i,n-
which drives some to frenzy and others to possibility that the person in question can scribed within this metaphor-i e, a
nullity, appearsto be in everycase, the cen- regainthe control of her body, let alone her woman'sinherentright to be not a doll but
tral fact of a woman's existence. What we brain, through her own initiative;reversals a fighter-is equally powerful. One's sense
have,then, is a realdisjuncturebetweenpar- of such conditions are rare,and they require of unease in all this comes, however,from
ticular episodes which can delineate quite the.agencynot so much of the patient as of the irrationaland spuriousmannerin which
vivid sympathies for the respective female doctors and hospitals. That Bilquis, her her violences accumulate and what she
characters on the one hand, and, on the mother,wouldhenceforthbe ashamedof the herself bechmes (a destroyerof men, fields,
other,a generalised str4cture of representa- child because the child is a moron, or that' animals;a four-leggedbeast herself)before
tion tn which each of those same characters Sufiya herself would become an object of she reachesher object, namely,the murder

Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991 1467

of her husband,the 'peripheralhero, Omar
Khayyam Shakil. The first such eruption
comes at the age of 12 when she goes out
and kills 218 turkeyswith a certainorgiastic
relish in her unfocused violence: "Sufiya
Zinobia had torn off their heads and then
reacheddown into theirbodies to drawtheir
guts up their necks".The explanation for it
is of coursesimpleenough: "twelveyearsof
unloved humiliationtake their toll, even on
an.idiot" (p 149). And the next eruption is,
from-the authorial standpoint, equally in-
nocent: on the day of her sister's marriage
she triesto do to her brother-in-lawwhatshe
had previouslydone to the turkeys,but she
manages only to twist his neck permanent-
ly out of shape, thus putting an end to his
polo-playingcareer.The explanationis again
quitesimple:'a pouringinto her too-sensitive
spirit of the great abundance of shame' at
the circumstances,presumably,in which the
marriage was taking place (p 186). An in-
stance of desolation in one case, a sense of
honour in the other! But then comes
something far more monumental. By then,
more yearshavepassed and she has married
Shakil who is forbidden to sleep with her
and sleeps with Shahbanou,her servant,in-
stead. She rightfullybeginsto wonderabout
sex, children,the meaningof marriageitself,
and Shakil'streachery;she has, at this point,
the brain of a six-yearold! One day, out of
frustrationand angerit seems,she walksout
of the house, picks up four men, has sexual
intercoursewith them, kills them, and comes
home with semen and blood on her veils.
The centralpassage in this whole episode is
worth quoting:
Shame walks the streetsof night. In the slums
four youths are transfixed by those appal-
ling eyes, whose deadly yellow fire blows like
a wind through the latticework of the veil.
They follow her to the rubbish-dump of
doom, rats to her piper, automata dancing
in the all-consuming light from the black-
veiled eyes. Down she lies; and what
Shahbanou took upon herself is finally done
to Sufiya. Four husbands come and go. Four
of them in and out, and then her hands reach
for the first boy's neck. The others standstill
and wait their turn. And heads hurled high,
sinking into the scatteredclouds; nobody saw
them fall. She rises, goes home. And sleeps;
the Beast subsides (p 242).
She becomes,in this passagethen, the oldest
of the misogynist myths: the virgin who is
really a vampire, the irresistibletemptress
who seduces men in order to kill them, not
an object of male manipulation but a
devourer of hapless men. And in thus
discoveringher 'true'self, she becomes the
opposite not only of that other daughterin
the book, Arjumand,the sexless'virginiron-
pants' (Rushdie'sversion of Benazir Bhut-
to), but also the oppositeof the Muslimmale
who, in some interpretationsof the Islamic
shari'a,is allowed four wives:what she does
to her 'fourhusbands'is of course somewhat
more extreme, perhaps because the
backwardness of her mind is more than mat-
ched by the enormity of her sexual appetite
1468
as well as her malevolence.
She comes home and sleeps, but it is only
a matter of time, obviously, before she
escapes again, this time for good, 'because
once a carnivorehas tasted blood you can't
fool it with vegetablesany more'and because
'the violence which had been born of
shame... now lived its own life beneath her
skin'(p 268). And she does escape,but 'what
now roamedfreein the unsuspectingair was
not Sufiya Zinobia Shakil at all, but
something more like a principle...a human
guillotine... ripping off men's heads'
(268-70). Soon enough, she ceases to be
human even in a literal sense and becomes,
of all things, 'a white panther'with a 'black
head, pale hairless body, awkward gait';
'storiesabout her...had begunto come from
all over the country' (p 280). And her
achievements:
Murdersof animalsand men, villagesraid-
ed in the dark, dead children,slaughtered
flocks, blood-curdlinghowls(p 280)... The
killingscontinued:farmers,pie-dogs,goats.
The murdersformeda death-ringroundthe
house;theyhadreachedthe outskirtsof the
twocities,newcapitalandold town.Murders
without rhymeor reason,done, it seemed,
for the love of killing, or to satisfy some
hideous need (p 287).
What the author takes to be the meaningof
all this dawns, improbably enough, upon
Omar Khayyam Shakil, her husband who
was also her doctor and who had been until
then nothingbut shamelessnesspersonified:
Forthe firsttimein herlife...thatgirlis free.
He imagined her proud; proud of her
strength,proudof theviolencethatwasmak-
inghera legend,thatprohibited anyonefrom
telling her what to do, or whom to be, or
whatshe shouldhavebeenand wasnot; yes
she had risenabove everything(p 281).
This is of course Rushdiehimself speaking;
thereis nothing in Shakil'scharacterto sug-
gest that he is capable of such an act of im-
aginative understanding. Yet, there is
somethingprofoundlyunsettlingabout this
idea of a 'freedom' which resides in rising
'above everything'(earlier in the book, we
have already encountered the idea of
'floating upward')and hence being able to
commit limitless, senseless violence. And if
this is indeed what Sufiya Zinobia has
become then it is very difficult, because of
the moral perplexity, for a reader to sym-
pathise witthher in that last episode of the
book whereshe finallymanagesto killOmar
KhayyamShakil himself. By then, it is no
longer a confrontation between shameless-
ness and shame but, rather,betweena man
who is of courseclearlya moralcripple,and
a woman who has become, not in the
metaphoricalbut in the most literal sense,
a beast.
This portrayalof SufiyaZinobia,combin-
ed with that of Bilquis and Rani which we
havediscussedearlierand that of Arjumand
('virgin ironpants')which we have not tlad
the opportunity to discuss at any length
raises a fundamental question about
Rushdie'sview of the world in general and
Economic and Political Weekly
of women in particular. Considering that
Rushdie himself has in his interviews
proudly stressedthe importanceof women
in Shame, as well as his own conception of
Sufia as a principleof honour and redemp-
tion, he seems to have fashioned a macabre
caricature of what female resistance to
cruelties might b; the woman herself
becomes, in this version, a rapist. For, so
wedded is Rushdie's imagination to im-
ageries of wholesale degradation and
urnrelieved social wreckage,so little able is
he to conceive of a real possibility of
regenerativeprojects on part of the people
who actuallyexist within our contemporary
social reality, that even when he attempts,
toward the end of the novel, to open up a
regenerative possibility, in - the form of
Sufiya's flight-and also her return, as
nemesisand all-devouringfury-the powers
which he, as author,bestowsupon her in the
moment of her triumphare powersonly of
destruction.It is indicativeof the temperof
the whole novel that even her innocence,up
to the goint where she remainsinnocent of
the social corruptionsof Rushdie'simagined
world, is the innocence merely of the mad
and the mentally retarded;she is doubtless
the onnly one who finallyobtainsthe energy
to oppose and win, but this energy is itself
rooted-literally, the noveltells us-in brain
fever. Her power is, moreover, not only
purelydestructivebut alsa blind,evenbefore
she takes her revengeupon her tormentors,
she has been on the prowl, we are told,
through all the nooks and corners of the
country, eating up animals and men,
destroyingfields, creatingterror.This kind
of image, which romanticises violence as
self-redemption,has of course no potential
for portrayingregenerativeprocesses; it is
linked up, further, in a most disagreeable
manner, with imperialist and misogynistic
myths:the imageof freedom-fighteras idiot-
terrorist;the image of a free-or freedom-
seeking-woman as vampire,amazon, man-
eating shrew.
What the characterisation of Sufiya
Zinobiaillustratesonce again is the limiting,
even misogynistic nature of the typologies
within which Rushdie encloses the whole
range of women's experience.As I pointed
out earlier, there are several episodes in
Shame where a sense of the oppression of
women is obvious enough; in one kind of
response one may now pity the victims of
this oppression, much in the mannerof the
liberal bourgeoisie which always pities the
poor. It is alsopossible to concede within
some limits, as regardsthe generalstructure
of his representationof women, that in real
life manywomenhavedoubtlessbeendriven
to madness,violence,phobia, dementia.But
women are not, in any fundamentalsense,
merevictimsof history;much more central-
ly, women havesurvivedagainst very heavy
odds, and they have produced history.
Madness, sexual frenzy, nullity of being,
feversof the brain, have been, by and large,
very uncommon; *the vast majorityrof
June 15, 1991
women haveconsistentlyperformedproduc-
tive (and not only re-productive)labour;
and, like those men who also do productive
work, they have retained with society and
history a relation essentially imaginative,
visionary, communal, and re-generative.
Eroticneed has been, for womenas for men,
often important, butIonlyin rarecases is it
the lone desire,outside loves and solidarities
of other kindt, work, in any case, has been
for the great majority far more central;
womenarenot, any morethan men are,mere
eroticised bodies. So, there is something
fundamentally awry about a system of
imageries which over-valorises, when it
comes to describingwomen, the zones of the
erotic,the irrational,the demented,and the
demonic. There is something fatally wrong,
that is to say,about a novelin whichvirtually
every woman is to be pitied, most to be
laughed at, some to be fearedat least some
of the time, but none who may be under-
stood in relationto those fundamentalpro-
jects of survivaland overcomingwhich are
none other than the production of history
itself. Satirisingthe mastersis one thing, but
it is a differentmatteraltogetherto give such
chilling portraits-only chilling portraits-
of women, in terms so very cloae to the
dominant stereotypes.
Rushdie's inability to include integral
regenerativepossibilities within the grotes-
que world of his. imaginative creation
represents,I believe,a conceptual flaw of a
fundamental kind. He speaks, again and
again in the book, of a 'country';but what
he gives us is a portrait,by and large,of the
cruel and claustrophobicworld of its ruling
class. That world he seems to know very
well, but to think of the portrait of rulers
as a portraitof the 'country'itself is an error,
I think, not only of politics, narrowlycon-
ceived, but also of the social imagination.
Hence the remarkable fact that while
Rushdietalks constantly of politics, all the
political acts representedwithin the matrix
of the novel are demagogic, opportunistic,
self-serving,cruel, or at least petty. Politics
is mostly farce, sometimes tragedy, but it
never is capable of producing resistanceto
oppression, solidarity and integrity in
human conduct, or any sort of humancom-
munity; for all its marvellous humour,
Rushdie'sinagined world is in its loveless-
ness almost Orwellian. And that, too, fits.
If the politicalvisionof yourimaginedworld
does not include those who resist, or love,
or act with any degree of integrity or
courage,then you will conCiLde,as Rushdie
does, in the 'worst tale in hi.story'which
comes in the final pages of the book, that
it is a country in which brother has been
betraying brother for generations! Now,
Pakistan'shistory is of course replete with
betrayals,as is India's,but it is this idea of
the permanence and pervasiveness of
betrayal-the Orwellianidea, in otherwords,
that human beings always betray one
another-which gives to this book its quite
extraordinaryqulalityof loyelessness.For an
equallybleak vision of human potentiait,,,,
Economic and Political Weekly June 05, 199.
one would have to go, I think, to 1984 or microscopic, invisible bacillus of optimism
to Naipaul'sA Bend In the River. There is, made its young people believe that they
I believe,a connection betweenthis view of would overcome some day, when unemploy-
the worldand Rushdie'sway of representing ment was an irrelevance and the future still
women. This issue of the representationof existed, and when I was twenty years old, I
women, I have argued, is important both bought from a bookshop in Cambridge a
because the issue of misogyny is always paperbackcopy of Ralph Manheim'sEnglish
central to any kind of oppositional project translation of The Tin Drum. In those days
everybody had better things to do than read.
and also because, in the absence of other
There was the music and there were the
kinds of representationsof any other op- movies and there was also, don't forget, the
pressedstrata,the representationof women world to change. Like many of my contem-
who are there in the book gives us crucial poraries I spent my student days under the
clues as to the general structureof his im- spell of Bunuel, Godard, Ray,Wajda,Welles,
aginative sympathies. Two points here are, Bergman, Kurosawa, Jancso., Antonioni,
I think, worth making. One is that any Dylan, Lennon, Jagger,Laing, Marcuse,and,
representationof women, whetherin fiction inevitably, the two-headed fellow known to
or in life, has to do, surely,with genderrela- Grass readers as Marxengels... . And my
tions, but also with more than gender rela- passports, the works that gave me the per-
tions; it is almost always indicative of a mits I needed, were The Film Sense by Sergei
much largerstructureof feelingand a much Eisenstein, the 'Crow' poems of Ted Hughes,
more complex political grid. What I have Borges' Fictions, Stern's- Tristam S/tandy,
attempted,in other words,is not a sufficient lonesco's play Rhinoceros-and, that sum-
reading of the book but a symptomatic mer of 1967, The Tin Drum.
reading: the concentration on a symptom I have quoted the last two sentences in the
which is itself-vividlycentralbut one which passage above ("Like many of my contem-
may also, in the same sweep, give us some poraries.." onwards) simply to convey a sense
understandingof the structureas a whole. of the kind of influences and cultural
Second, politics appearsto me to be a mat- milieux which have gone into making the
ter not so much of opposition as of solida- type of imagination which Rushdie has.
rity; it is always much less pr6blematic to Here, though, I am much more interested in
denounce dictators and to affirm, instead, the opening statements. The tone is obvious-
a generality of values, let us say 'the ly satiric, even sardonic, and the follies listed
enlightenment',as Rushdiedoes towardthe here are of course not his own but, we are
end of Shame-or 'liberty' or whatever- told, the West's. The tone of mockery is
but alwaysmuch harderto affiliate oneself designed, meanwhile, to de-stabilise the
with specific kinds of praxis,conceived not meaning of the passage itself. Despite this
in termsof valueswhichserveas a judgment strategem, however, one can detect the
on history but as a solidarity with com- tendency to repeat, almost unthinkingly, the
munities of individuals, simultaneously commonplaces and even inaccuracies of the
flawed and heroic, who act within that metropolis' high culture. It is doubtful for
history,fromdeterminatesocial and political example, that something called 'the West'
positions. was, in the summer of 1967, 'in the clutches
of optimism'; that was the year of the Tet
V
offensive, and at least a part of"'the West'
Quite aside from other sorts of choices American imperialism for example, was not
Rushdiemight or might not havemade,that at all 'optimistic. It is equally doubtful that
kind of politics is precludedfor him by the 'optimism' the idea that 'the future still
very(post)modernistlocation he chooses for exists', the hope that we 'would overcome
himself and by the extent to which he some day', the conviction that 'there is a
valorises the experienceof 'migrancy'and world to change-is as such a 'disease! (a
unbelonging.This is clear enough in Shame 'microscopic. invisible bacillus', we are
but is even more visible in more direct,non- playfully told). Tfobe amrused, in retrospect,
fictional kinds of writing. To illustratethis at the youthfulness of one's own youth is one
point, I want to look briefly at two pieces thing; but to learn ftrom maturity that a
of his which I have selected quite arbitrari- visionary relation with reality is itself folly,
ly: his brief essay on GunterGrass(Granta, that literature is an antidote to such follies,
no 15),and his succinct,delightfuicommen- is to participate, at least unwittingly, in
tary,'OutsideThe Whale'in AmericanFilmr, precisely the kind of quietism which Rushdie
on the recent deluge of movies about the hirmiselfseems to formally reject, in other
British raj. My choice is arbitrary in the parts of this brief essay and in many other
sense that these are neither more nor less of his writings.
representative than several other of his Despair is now, in this age of late
pieces;I chose them becausetheycame soon capitalism and the aftermath of high moder-
after Shame and because they are short, in nism. so constitutive a part of the contem-
some other ways delightfullyinventive,and porary bourgeois culture, and it is combin-
therefore disturbing for their rather flip ed so casually with so many sorts of private
postrrodernist ambieM'.-C. pleasures, that one forgets, when one comes
The essay on Ut-rass,; zfrexample, begins: upon such formulations ('no future' and all
In the summer of 1t96' whenA the West that), how bleak a vision of human possibili-
was-perhxsc for the :ltO trvne-in theclut- ty this type of thinking signifies. And, it is
ches of t* l s)Fti
e t'fit *Jfat whenthe perhapsbecauseof his discomfortwith such
1469
bleaKnessthat Rushdieends the essay, for-
mally, on the word 'hope'.But before we get FORM II-A
to that formal ending, we see some other
characteristicways in which Rushdie par- Form of general notice to be given to the members of the public before making an
ticipates in that cultural ambience. For ex- application to the Central Government under sub-section (2) of Section 22 of the
ample, he first speaks of Grass and of Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1969.
himself as 'migrants',in the literal sense of
the word, as individuals who were born in NOTICE
one society and have migratedto another; It is hereby notified for the information of the public that FORBESFORBESCAMPBELL
on this score, he says some very perceptive & CO. LTD., BOMBAYproposes to make an application to the Central dovernment
things. But then he goes on to extend the in the Department of -Company Affairs, New Delhi, under the sub-section (2) of
meaning of 'migration' to a universal on- Section 22 of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1969, for approval
tologicalplain: 'we are all migrants'he says, to the- establishment of a new undertaking/unit/division. Brief particulars of the
in the sense that 'we all cross frontiers.That proposal, are as under:
too is true, though in a very banal sort of 1. Name and address of the : FORBESFORBESCAMPBELL& CO. LTD.
way. The problem, however,comes when, applicant Forbes Building, Charanjit Rai Marg,
havingdefined'migration'as a metaphorfor Fort, Bombay 400 001.
the human condition as such, he goes on to 2. Capital Structure of the applicant : Equity Unclassified
say that a migrantis 'a metaphori'calbeing' organisation Rs. Rs.
and that 'the migrantintellectroots itself in Authorised Capital 484,00,000 10,00,000
itself' because it understands'the artificial Issued, Subscribed and Paid-up
nature of reality'. Now, if a migrant is a Capital 424,96,520
metaphorical being, and if 'we are all 3. Management structure of the : Dr. F.A. Mehta - Chairman &
migrants" then, obviously, we are all applicant organisation indicating Managing Director
'metaphoricalbeings'; and reality itself is the names of Directors including Mr. N.A. Soonawala - Vice Chairman
'artificial' then not only in the sense that Managing/Wholetime Directors and Mr. D.J. Madan
much of it is made by us but also in the Manager, if any Mr. K.S. Gaekwar
much more idealistic and modernist sense Mr. D.B. Engineer
that life does not existoutsideits metaphors; Mr. Akbar Hydari
and if realityis only 'artificial'('artefact'is Mr. Gurcharan Das
another word Rushdieuses in this context), Mr. D.S. Parekh
Mr. D. N. Poonegar -Joint Managing
then, obviously,the writer'sintellect has no
Director
choice but to 'root itself in itself';the tie bet- Mr. D.S. Soman
ween social despair,a literal loss of reality,
and narcissism is now complete. Within 4. Indicate whether the proposal : The proposal does not relate to the
relates to the establishment of a establishment of a new undertaking or
these ideological predicates, what kind of new undertaking or a new a new unit/division. However, it relates
'hope does one speakof, when one does end unit/division to the marketing of new products viz.
one's essay on that word? Here, too, variety of Hand Tools, Cutting Tools
Rushdie'sown words, in the two sentences etc. required for Engineering Industry.
which vrecede the sentence of,'hope', are
5. Location of the new undertaking : Not Applicable
significant: or a new unit/division
The composition of elegies is indeed one of
the proper responses for a writer to make 6. Capital structure of the proposed : There will be no change in the capital
when the night is drawing in. But outside his undertaking structure
fiction, in his)politicalactivities and writings, 7. In case the proposal ?elates
Grass is making atsecond, and equally pro- to the production, storage, supply,
per' response. What this work says is: we distribution, marketing or control
aren't dead yet. of any goods/articles, indicate:
The presumptionis that 'the night is draw- (i) Name of goods/articles
Marketing of new products viz. variety
ing in'; again, there is no future. So far as of Hand Tools, Cutting Topls etc.
the writingof fiction is concerned,therefore, )required licensed capacity for Engineering Industry
one writes 'elegies. Resistance,such as it is, (ii) Proposed :
belongs to other realms;political activities (iii) Estimated annual turnover : Rs. 2 Crores.
and directly political writings. In other 8. In case the proposal relates : Not applicable
words, art can only be an art of despair; to the provision of any service,
whateverelse one does, one does elsewhere. state the volume of activity in
But in that other realmtoo, all one can say terms of usual measures such as
is 'we aren't dead yet' The presumption value, income, turnover, etc.
again is that the apocalypse, the demonic 9. Cost of Project : N IL
end of the world, is at hand; we shall soon 10. Scheme of Finance including : Not Applicable
all be dead, and our laughter,if it is laughter the amounts to be raised from
at all, is the laughter of the day before the each source
world ends. One acts, in other words, not
Any person interested in the matter may make a representation in quadruplicate to
because one hopes.to change anything but the $ecretary, Department of Company Affairs, Government of India, Shastri Bhavan,
because one is condemned, by existential New Delhi, within 14 days from the date of publication of this Notice, intimating
necessity, to act; we are back to Beckett's his views on the proposal and indicating the nature of his interest therein.
formula 'I cannot go on... I'll go on"
which Rushdiehimself quotes most approv- For FORBES FORBES CAMPBELL& CO. LTD.
ingly in his other essay,'Outsidethe Whale'. C.T; GHADIALI
I do not have the space here to offer a Dated this 12th June, 1991. SECRETARY
detailed reading of that odd essay- odd in

1470 Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991

the sense that it is so very good in so many
ways and yet, in the last instance, so pro-
foundly marred by Rushdie's aesthetic of
despair.One of the oddest things about the
essay is that after developinga superbcriti-
que of Orwell,particularlyof the essay from
which Rushdie himsglf took his title, and
after rejectingthe political quietism which
Orwell recomjnendsin that essay, Rushdie
goes on to display not only the same kind
of sensibility we find in his Grass essay but
also his peculiar ability, which he seems to
share with Orwell, to enunciate altogether
antithetic ideas in one breath. Thus, one is
hardput to know just wherehe stands intel-
lectually when he says, for example,in con-
secutivesentencesof a singleparagraph,that
'we are all irradiated by history, we are
radioactivewith history and politics, which
is history in action' and 'politics is by turns
farce and tragedy,and sometimes... both at
once'. Now, if 'politics is by turns farceand
tragedy', and politics is also 'history in
action',then what exactlyis one sayingabout
'history' which has 'irradiated'all o( us?
That we are irradiatedwith the 'farce and
tragedy'of historyitself? So, it is only fitting
that by the end of that paragraphwe find
Rushdiequoting, veryapprovingly,Beckett's
formulaof 'I cannot go on..' etc. Again, the
problem is that if that kind of world-
weariness is where one takes one's final
stand, and if histary has already been
dismissed as 'farce and tragedy',then why
on earth does one want to quarrel with
'Orwell?After all, Orwell too made plenty
of room in his writings for what he took to
be 'politics' and he too thought that politics
was sometimes tragic, more frequently
farcical.
VI
This parallelwith Orwell is not a minor
matter.Now, undoubtedly,a politicaldiscus-
sion of Rushdie's work has become extra-
ordinarilydifficult in the wakeof the terror
unleashed against him by Iran's clerical
rulers. But in .those earlier days when his
own life was not so endangered, and as
Midnight's Childrenand Shame first burst
upon the internationalscene, receivingequal
accolades from New Left Review and The
New YorkTimes,one was struck by the fact
that not since Orwell had a political writer
with a colonial background, and one who
had declared himself a socialist, been so
equally admired on the right and the left.
Alongsidethe lovelessnessof thpfictions,the
repeatedintrusionsof a misogynisticstreak,
and a certain spontaneous belief in the
universalityof betrayal, which Orwell too
had begun displaying since his earliest
writings, Burmese Days onwards, Rushdie
has also deployed that same stance of un-
belonging,of the lone individualoccupying
a moral high groundabove the 'chimerasof
politics' (Rushdie's phrase), delivering his
_denunciationsof left and right alike: Indira
Gandhi, the Pakistani Geruerals,the Com-
munistPatis the Naxalites,film stars,pro-
Economic and Political Weekly June 15, 1991
phets, the short-livedbanningof La Prensa.
On certain issues-racism, religiosity, dic-
tatorship, empire, and the like-one could
take a position, and one could also in a
general way speak of oneself as a man of
the left, at Orwellhimselffrequentlydid;but
there was no actual left, no existing com-
munity of praxis, within that world which
had given to one's imaginationand fictions
their energy, with which one felt in any
fundamental way bonded, accepting and
strugglingwith the risksand the restrictions
and the suffering that such bonding often
implies. From all such groundingsone had
'floated upward', even as one constantly
thrashedabout denouncing all, undifferen-
tiatedly, that one had left behind. In an
earlier time, right into the heart of moder-
nism, such desolations of the self werestill
experiencedquite frequentlyas a loss; what
postmodernism has done is to validate
preciselythe pleasuresof such unbelonging
which is rehearsednow as a utopia, so that
belongingnowhereis construednevertheless
as the perennial pleasure of belonging
everywhere.
In this context I can do no better than to
simplyquote a longishpassagefromthat old
classic, Cultureand Society, which is osten-
sibly about Orwell but clearly speaks of
larger things:
Orwellwas one of a significantnumberof
men who, deprivedof a settled way of
living...find virtuein a kind of improvised
living,andin an assertionof independence.
The tradition,in England,is distinguished.
It attractsto itselfmanyof theliberalvirtues:
empiricism,a certainintegrity,frankness.It
has also, as the normallycontingentvirtue
of exilequalitiesof perception: in particular,
the abilityto distinguishinadequaciesin the
groupswhichhavebeenrejected...there is an
appearance of hardness(theausterecriticism
of hypocrisy,complacency,self-deceit),but
thisis usuallybrittle,andat timeshysterical...
Alongside the tough rejection of com-
promise,whichgivesthe traditionits virtue,
is the felt social impotence,the inabilityto
form extendingrelationships...
...Yetwe need to makea distinctionbet-
ween exile and vagrancy:thereis usuallya
principlein exile,thereis alwaysonly relaxa-
tion in vagrancy...The vagrant,in literary
terms,is the 'reporter'...it
is unlikelythat he
will understand,in anydepth,the life about
which he is writing...Buta restlesssociety
veryeasilyacceptsthis kindof achievement:
at one levelthe reporton the curiousor the
exotic;at anotherlevel, when the class or
society is nearer the reporter'sown, the
perceptive critique.
Now afterthe Ayatollah'ssentencingof him,
Rushdie's 'vagrancy' has turned, parado-
xically and tragically, into a full-scale
exile-even from mainstream Britain. But
eventhat earlierconditionof the production
of his work need hardly be used to merely
deny the breadthof his achievement,which
is substantial. What Raymond Williams'
remarkson Orwellhelp us understandnever-
theless is the importance,indeed 'the tradi-
tion',of certainwaysof livingwhich in some
cases-in Orwell's and Rushdie!srsurely-
havebeenconnectedwith a colonialpast but
are in no fundamentalsense limited or at-
tributableto the colonial experienceper se.
Exile, in the true sense, is of many kinds
besidethe purelycolonial, and it in any case
rarelyproduces an enduring sense of great
pleasure. Exile usually has, as Williams
points out, a principle, and the principle
preventsone from 'floating upward'and de-
nying the pain. Self-exileand 'vagrancy',by
contrast, have become more common
amongst artists in everysuccessivephase of
bourgeois culture since the early days of
Romanticism, and as the experience itself
has been chosen with greaterfrequencythe--
sense of celebrationand of 'the migrantin-
tellect root[ing] itself in itself' has grown
proportionately.It is the palpable presence
of this kind of livingin Rushdie'swork,with
its accompanyinginabilityto believein any
communityof actualpraxis,hencethe belief
in the universalityof betrayal,which is lost
in those readingsof his work which locate
it primarilyin the problematicof the 'nation'
and the 'Third World',even if one ends by
complicatingthat location. Williams' sum-
mary evaluationof that 'tradition',with his
highly perceptivediagnosis of its particular
virtuesand fallings, would imply, if follow-
ed in its full logic, that Rushdie'swork is to
be located neither in some unified and
categorisable'ThirdWorld',nor in some in-
nocent myth of 'migrancy' as Rushdie
himself would have it, nor in an empty,
postmodernist 'cosmopolitanism',but in a
condition which is in some basic waysolder,
wider, far more extreme.
Notes
[The above is a provisional draft of an essay
which is itself part of a book-length
manuscript, on some of the thematics of con-
temporaryliterarytheory which are formulated
in the metropolitan countries.]
I See, in particular,my 'ThirdWorld Literature
and the Nationalist Ideology' in Journal of
Arts and Ideas, nos 17-18(June 1989, New
Delhi).
2 All references to Shame in this essay are to
the Vintage/Aventuraedition of September
1984.
3 See, in particular, my article cited above.
Economic atid Political Weekly
Available from
M/s. Books and News Mart,
MI Road
Jaipur - 302 001,
Rajasthan.
M/s. N E B S,
Dharampeth,
Nagpur - 440 010,
Maharashtra.
M/s. Subash News Agency,
2nd Outside Hall Gate,
Amritsar,
Punjab.
1471