Fiction as Fission: Salman Rushdie’s Aesthetics of Fragmentation and Hybridity Hassan Ben-Deggoun HYBRID ['haIbrId] n. & adj. --n. 1 Biol. the offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties. 2 often offens. a person of mixed racial or cultural origin. 3 a thing composed of incongruous elements, e.g. a word with parts taken from different languages. --adj. 1 bred as a hybrid from different species or varieties. 2 Biol. heterogeneous. /hybrid vigour heterosis. //hybridism n. hybridity n. [L hybrida, (h)ibrida offspring of a tame sow and wild boar, child of a freeman and slave, etc.] Oxford English Dictionary. ―If The Satanic verses is anything, it is a migrant‘s eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis‖ Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 393.

The postcolonial writer is, according to Salman Rushdie, liable to develop a fragmentary vision of reality because of his or her experience of displacement and uprooting. This fragmentation conditions the perception of the past, history, memory, identity, text etc. and of any new idea. Instead of finding truth in long established shared verities, what is known as modern ―grand narratives‖, Rushdie privileges a non-totalized, pluralistic, open ended form of discourse that coincides with postmodern writing practices. Truth-value in his view is multiple and non-transcendental. But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’1. (our emphasis)

The impossibility of ‗whole sight‘ is due to the position occupied by the postcolonial subject as being in the same time insider and outsider. The metaphor of the stereoscopic vision2 clearly shows how rich and complex the post-colonial representation of the reality is. In other terms, as an insider, Rushdie is postmodern in his validation of the uncertainty principle, including the area of religious belief. As an outsider, he is post-colonialist in his satirical subversion of the center's certainties and its exercise of power. This in-between and ambiguous position which may be seen as an impediment to his own status as a postcolonial writer in need of clear stances, is noticeably rendered in the fictional text as a hybrid composition of unexpected items. To show the intricacy of hybridity in Rushdie‘s fiction, particularly in The Satanic 3 Verses , I would like to put the stress on three different issues. First of all, hybridity is a critique of representation as practiced within the postcolonial and postmodern conditions. Indeed, Rushdie‘s texts, being composed of other texts and languages, challenge the very notion of text as a close system, based on binary oppositions. The use of specific and multiple 1

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands : Essays and criticism 1981-1991, 1991, p. 19. A stereoscope is an instrument for obtaining a single image giving impression of solidity or relief from two pictures from slightly different point of views. 3 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, London : Viking Penguin, 1988. 2

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discursive and narrative techniques like magic realism, dream sequences, unreliable narrators etc. partakes of a fragmentary world made out of unexpected items. Secondly, hybridity is also a critique of subjectivity. Rushdie‘s texts provide us with fragile, vulnerable and de-centered human beings who undergo a long process of selfidentification and whose access to meaning is constantly deferred if not definitely compromised. Their body bears the signs of their peregrinations, and their metamorphosis shows the complexity of their painful evolution. Thirdly, hybridity is not free from ideological motivations, and plurality is unmistakably an impediment when it is necessary to take a clear stand on fundamental issues such as fundamentalism or nationalism or cultural containment. The ethical implications of hybridity are conditioned by the reception of Rushdie‘s texts by readers who do not necessarily share the writer‘s predilection for eclecticism. What is known as The Rushdie Affaire4 is symptomatic of such an aesthetic option.

A world of fragments: postmodern and postcolonial alchemy Before discussing the possibility of a successful alchemy of post-colonialism and postmodernism, a brief definition of the term ‗post-colonialism‘ is necessary. Ania Loomba notes: The prefix "post"....implies an "aftermath" in two senses - temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. It is the second implication which critics of the term have found contestable: if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependant) at the same time 5.

Rushdie‘s texts fit in the two senses of Loomba‘s post-colonialism. Most of them takes place after the independence of India and use elements from both Indian and western cultures. This in-between status is the first step towards the consruction of a hybrid fiction, portraying, according to Edward Said the ―conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories....[This] is of particular interest in Rushdie's work‖6. One idea is central to The Satanic Verses, and maybe to Rushdie‘s fiction as a whole: the concept of newness; in other words the capacity of new ideas to compromise. According to Michael Wood, Rushdie deplores, when such a compromise is impossible, ―the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One 7‖. Multiplicity is regarded as a means to achieve harmony without any idea of transcendence and supremacy. The great challenge that the new religion of Submission had to face was actually to cope with already existing beliefs. The novel starts with Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, two Indian movie stars, falling from the sky, out of the blue, ―two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel […] out of thin air‖ (TSV, p. 3). The aircraft transporting them from Bombay to London is blown up by Sikh extremists whose leader refuses any concession. What is left is a huge wreckage among which two survivors experience a deep transformation as two displaced subjects, or maybe objects ―Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork‖ 4

For a detailed account of The Rushdie Affaire, see Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (ed.) The Rushdie File, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990. 5 Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 7. 6 Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994, p. 260. 7 Wood, Michael. ―Shenanigans‖, London Review of Books, 7 Sept., 1995, vol. 3, N° 5, p. 3.

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(TSV, p. 4). The ―open-beaked stork‖ helps identify the two men as immigrants engaged in an endless displacement. The explosion is first and foremost indicative of the destruction of an uncompromising old order and the creation of a new one made out of fragments. The survival of the new one is however dependent on its willingness to compromise. How does newness come into the world? Of what fusions, transformations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? (TSV, p. 8)

The fall links together death and rebirth ―to be born again […] you have to die‖ (TSV, p. 3). New creation and birth are joined with elements which could fit in an alchemical process as if inscribed in a cycle of incarnations: it is about mutation, fusion, transformation, metamorphosis. Hybridity is this newness that comes into the world and challenges the purity of an origin that is no more consistent. Saladin and Gibreel fall like great insects or beetles reminding us of Kafka‘s Metamorphosis. They plummet among hundreds of objects towards the English channel which becomes the tunnel that leads, like Alice in Wonderland, to the world of fantasy and imagination. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen mask […] mingling with the remnant of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslated jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. (TSV, p. 4) (our emphasis)

The heterogeneous aspect of these fragments, both concrete and abstract, tumbling from the sky like falling stars is a metaphor for the whole text as a continual and diffuse composition of assorted objects and notions ready to be reconstructed from an equally disjointed perspective. It is this very disjunction that makes The Satanic Verses, a daring text, following in Gunter Grass‘s footsteps8. Rushdie asserts that: The satanic verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it 9.

The claim for impurity and hybridity mirrors a deliberate discontinuity that stems from the experience of immigration and displacement. Hybridity is therefore the negation of purity and the celebration of multiplicity and eclecticism. Akbar S. Ahmed argues that ―the mixing of images, interlocking of cultures, juxtaposition of different peoples, availability of information, are partly explained because populations are mobile as never before‖10. The postcolonial subject is therefore a composite individual at the crossroad of many cultures, developing a fragmentary vision. Rushdie recognizes that, as an Indian writer, he can reflect the world he describes only in fragments: ―It may be that when the Indian writer who writes 8

―This is what Grass‘s great novel [Tin Drum] said to me in its drumbeats : Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets […] Argue with the world. An never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one thing—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers‖, Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 277. 9 Salman Rushdie, ―In Good Faith‖, in Imaginary Homelands, p. 394. 10 Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam, Routledge: London and New York, 1992, p. 26.

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from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been inevitably lost11‖. In the same time, in supporting his right to defend all issues endlessly, to postpone closure ad infinitum, to oppose certainties of all kinds (―fears the absolutism of the Pure‖) whether they derive from the East or the West, Rushdie is also clearly positioning himself as a writer in a post-modern world where nothing can be asserted with assurance. Hybridity and bricolage12 come as a confirmation of this absence of adamant faith. Indeed, There is a fundamental discontinuity in Rushdie‘s texts which consists in the loss of faith and the establishment of doubt from a secular point of view. Postmodernism allows, indeed encourages, the juxtaposition of discourses, an exuberant eclecticism, the mixing of diverse images. The postmodernist montage mixes the highbrow and the populist, the alienating and the accessible; the taste is eclectic, the outlook dégagé. […] Lyotard echoes the sentiment exactly by dismissing the eclecticism as 'the degree zero of contemporary general culture‘13.

The purity of origin, identity, language, beliefs, memory, tradition etc., considered by extremists as unyielding absolutes, is made to vanish within the discourse of fiction by the mixing of ―the highbrow and the populist‖. In this respect, fictional texts actually offer an interesting means for ―unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstituted‖14. In the opening chapter of the The Satanic Verses Rushdie forces his readers to become conscious of the paradoxical nature of fiction‘s notion of ―true‖ discourse: ―Once upon a time - it was and it was not so, as the old stories used to say, it happened and it never did - maybe, then, or maybe not...‖ (TSV, p. 35). All fictional discourse is predicated by that ―maybe‖. It is for the reader to decide on the probability of the imaginative construct. The book begins by flouting any sense of factual reality with an impossible rebirth. Therefore, the novel's plurality of discourses, its multiplicity of voices, its postmodern resistance to totalizing explanations, positivist ideologies and narrative closure challenge the very concept of the Novel as a literary genre. The postmodern narrative strategies used by Rushdie aim at mirroring the fragmentation of reality for they consist in combining and superposing conflicting genres and modes. The mode or genre equal to dealing with the exigencies of […] fragmentation must perforce be equally fragmented. In fact, the narrative must be a mishmash of conflicting genres and modes […] in which the Comic and the Tragic, the Real, Surreal and the Mythic all ‗defuse‘ each other so no one genre can predominate and ―unify‖ the others 15.

Saleem Sinai‘s narrative act in Midnight’s Children16 is turned into an oral transmission of a mythic text, the Ramayana. In spite of coming from a Muslim background, Saleem actually compares himself to the poet Ganesh dictating the sacred text to his disciple Valkimi. The inaccuracy of this comparison transforms Saleem from the start into an unreliable narrator. According to Hindu teachings, the elephant-headed god Ganesh sat at the feet of the bard Vyasa to take down the Mahabharata. Saleem‘s numerous mistakes are rather emphasized instead of being expunged from the text so as to show the imaginary aspect of the 11

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit., p. 10. The notion of ‗bricolage‘ is central to postmodern thought because within media-saturated cultures, it becomes the inevitable response to semiotic overload. This is not to imply that individual discourses and institutions within our cultures do not attempt to provide totalizing modes. 13 Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam, op. cit., p. 25. 14 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit., p. 122. 15 Fawzia Afzal-Khan, ―Postmodernist Strategies of Liberation in the Works of Salman Rushdie‖, Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 23, N° 1, 1988, p. 139. 16 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, London : Picador in association with Jonathan Cape, 1982. 12

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narrative. The Satanic Verses is also halfway between the novel and the fairy-tale. Gibreel‘s last account of his experience as a disbelieving man, is presented as a tale from the Arabian Nights. It is but an invitation to reread the whole text as a work of pure imagination. But Gibreel had closed his eyes, put his fingertips together and embarked upon his story — which was also the end of many — thus: Kan ma kan Fi qadim azzaman (TSV. p. 544)

―Kan ma kan Fi qadim azzaman‖ corresponds to the Arabic incipit of fairy tales. In other words, the Arabic equivalent of ―once upon a time‖ that we also find in the opening page of Midnight’s Children: ―I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time‖ (MC, p. 9). The rejection of the inaugural sentence from the very beginning of the text is indicative of the displacement of the art of the novel from any orthodox conception into a fundamentally hybrid means of expressing the world. Gibreel‘s blasphemous visions introduce a new dimension in such a way as to blur the frontier between dream and ‗reality‘. This blurring is said to bring the light of truth to a world benighted by the unitary truths of politics and religion. The breaking of boundaries of genre is a political act of liberation by rejecting the narrative strategies of containment inherent to western novelistic form. If heterogeneity is considered as one of the basic components of our contemporary societies because of mass migration, and fostered by postmodernism, India offers indeed a remarkable example of cultural and ethnic hybridity. Indian oral tradition remains a source of inspiration that never dries up. The possibility of a pure and unalloyed tradition is then absent, unless it is synonymous with inescapable bloodsheds. Rushdie tries to espouse this diversity in his novels in order to achieve a universal message. The rest of us understand that the very essence of Indian culture is that we possess a mixed tradition, a mélange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary CocaCola American. To say nothing of Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Jewish, British, French? Portuguese, Marxist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Vietnamese, capitalist, and of course Hindu elements. Eclecticism, the ability to take from the world what seems fitting and to leave the rest, has always been a hallmark of the Indian tradition, it is at the centre of the best work being done both in the visual arts and in literature. Yet eclecticism is not really a nice word in the lexicon of ‗Commonwealth literature‘17. (our emphasis)

Eclecticism is, according to Rushdie, not reduced to chaos and arbitrariness, but is a matter of selection, ―to take from the world what seems fitting and to leave the rest‖. This is certainly Rushdie‘s way to handle history and memory, either by conscious or unintentional selections ―time and migration‖ Rushdie declares ―had placed a double filter between me and my subject18‖. Historiographic metafiction puts into relief this double filtering by rereading history from a fictional perspective. Not far from the Shaandaar Café where Saladin Chamcha achieves his fiendish transformation, Club Hot Wax is to be found. The club is famous for its wax effigies representing historical figures so as to be burnt by dancers in a moment of ecstasy. See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence‘s candle; — and over there!, one Abu Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was done by colour-barring ministers. They‘re all here, dancing motionlessly in hot wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right; to the left, George IV’s barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw Groniosaw, the African prince who sold for six feet of cloth, 17 18

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit. p. 67. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit. p. 23-24.

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dances according to his ancient fashion with the slave‘s son Ignatius Sancho, who became in 1782 the first African writer to be published in England […] and from a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light, wax villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local avatars of Legree. (TSV., p. 292) (our emphasis)

The complexity and opacity of The Satanic Verses come from the exuberant network of historical references, allusions, puns, references to films, songs, musicals, etc. creating thus a ‗defamiliarisation‘ effect that problematizes the access to meaning. The figures contained in this passage are both historical and imaginary. The reader is introduced into Hot Wax night club where he becomes a spectator.. They are of three types: those whom history recognises as great figures ―Queen Victoria / George IV / Septimius Severus (the Roman Emperor)‖. Second, those made invisible by the official versions of history, because of their blackness, ―Mary Seacole (who played a leading role in the Cremea War / Abu Karim, aka The Munshi (Queen Victoria‘s counsellor)/ Grace Jones (a famous black singer and model of 1920s) / Ukawsaw Groniosaw19 (a slave) / Ignatius Sancho (African writer)‖, and finally those considered as ―wax villains‖, because of their racist stands ―Mosley, Powell, Edward Long20‖. These British politicians are said to be the avatars of a slave-owning villain, the fictional figure of Simon Legree, a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The use of the word ―avatars‖, the Hindu term for incarnation, in this context is suggestive of an impossible union, of white history seen by black eyes. To avoid any binary oppositions between black and white, official and unofficial histories, Rushdie creates a dynamic interaction between history, fiction, politics and religion which offers no clear boundaries. All the wax figures are made to dance motionlessly without privileging one over the other or granting anyone with any particular virtue. In order to turn on their head all normal boundaries and prohibitions, the sacred is also made to interact with the profane. Salman the Persian, an immigrant, who bears the same name and identity as Rushdie, is presented as the official scribe of Mahound. To test the authenticity and infallibility of the Word of God and his Prophet, he introduces his own profane words into the Revelation creating thus a hybrid text cast in a fictional discursive form, and producing consequently the very evidence of a corrupted message. ‗Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was described as allhearing, all-knowing, I would write all-knowing, all-wise. Here is the point : Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God’s own Messenger, then what did that mean ? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry ? Look, I swear, I was shaken to the soul (TSV. p. 367) (our emphasis)

Salman deliberately mistranscribes Mahound's dictation, and surprisingly discovers that his ―poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God's own Messenger‖. Rushdie‘s text does not suppress the sacred book, it could not. But it purposely challenges its credibility, its supposedly pure and divine origin, and eternal veracity. Rushdie‘s texts are then based on a process of demystification of all systems of truth and beliefs ―Pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it‖21. It is Rushdie's contextualization of the Koran within the discourse of postmodern 19

He wrote an account of his life in slavery, published in 1731, entitled: A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Groniosaw, an African Prince, Written by Himself. 20 Oswald Mosley (1896-1980) , Enoch Powell (1912- ), both Conservative MPs known for their antiimmigration political discourse. 21 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit, p. 15.

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fiction that has brought on the charge of blasphemy22. There is however something risky in this endless process of rewriting and ―polluting the Word of God‖, witness the Iranian fatwa and the whole Rushdie Affaire. Not only the Koran which is being challenged in The Satanic Verses, but also Islam as the new religion of Submission. Its final inability to compromise by becoming a polytheistic religion makes it synonymous with intolerance and fanaticism. When the narrator of The Satanic Verses describes Mahound‘s twelve wives in a whorehouse, sacred and secular sexuality, like sacred and secular verbal creativity, are made to appear virtually identical in a fictional context. Set in a hybrid system by Rushdie‘s use of a lighthearted and punning tone, the absolutes of Islamic faith become humanized and relativized. The notion of hierarchy is missing. Within Rushdie's fictional universe most certainties and absolutes held by religion crumble. Uncertainty is the only unchanging certainty that Rushdie masterly posits in the novel. The Satanic Verses can be seen as a bricolage of conflicting discourses framed by the controlling discourse of fiction. Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations between them, which are relations of power 23.

Rushdie‘s hybrid fiction highlights the quarrel over power between values and narratives by suspending all laws, prohibitions and restrictions. Every kind of misalliance is formed according to Bakhtin‘s conception of carnivalistic fiction which includes ―carnivalistic blasphemies, carnivalistic debasing […]carnivalistic obscenities […] carnivalistic parodies of sacred texts and sayings24‖. Bakhtin‘s carnival is a transposition into literature of the festive manifestations of eccentricities of behaviour, gesture and discourse where no status is permanent. Intertextuality, or Bakhtine‘s diologicality, is another way to think hybridity for it resists the teleology of closure which arrests the play of meaning. It also questions linearity that makes closure seem a kind of natural ending. It is but a collection of fragmentary texts. ―Intertextuality replaces the challenged author-text relationship with one between reader and text, one that situates the locus of textual meaning within the history of discourse itself25‖. In the same way Saleem has many fathers and mothers, Rushdie‘s texts do not have a single author since they are constructed of a mosaic of other texts. Authorship gives way to a multiplicity of authors blurring the outlines of the text, dispersing its image of totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts. Every single page of The Satanic Verses is a condensation of intertextual references and allusions, not necessarily explicit, but most of the time parodied. Having the gift to imitate various voices ―he was the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voices‖ (TSV, p. 60), Saladin Chamcha works in a TV entertaining programme for children called The Aliens Show, a ―comedy about a group of extraterrestrials raging from cute to psycho, from animal to vegetable, and also mineral‖ (TSV, p. 62). Characters‘ names are distorted allusions to literary texts, films, myths, paintings etc. This rock was named Pygmalien […] this was Matilda, the Australien, and there were the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space sirens known as the Alien Korns […] and there was Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast, who looked like a Francis Bacon painting […] and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. (TSV, p. 62) (our emphasis) 22

For discussion of the charge of blasphemy and apostasy, see Shabbir Akhtar, Be Careful With Muhammad!, London: Bellew, 1989. 23 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 420. 24 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: Minnosota, UP, 1984, p. 123. 25 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 126.

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The name of ―Pygmalien‖, as a reference to the classical Greek sculptor who fell in love with his own creation and brought her to life, is quite relevant when applied to a rock. It also refers to George Bernard Shaw‘s play Pygmalion. The pun on ―Autralien‖, as a contraction of ‗Australia‘ and ‗alien‘ is linked to the name of Matilda, of Australia‘s most famous song Waltzing Matilda. ―Alien Korns‖ is a fragment from John Keats‘s poem Ode to a Nightingale26. The reference to ‗corn‘, or grains, is associated with the theme of immigration and the comparison of the immigrant not only to an egg, but to a seed, a spermatozoa introduced into the ‗womb‘ of the alien land. ―Ridley‖ and ―Sigourney Weaver‖ are familiar names since they refer respectively to Ridley Scott the director of Alien (1979), and the star. Last but not least, ―Francis Bacon‖ is a British painter famous for grotesque portraits, which emphasizes the monstrous aspect of Saladin as an immigrant. The show was effectively described as the ―reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks‖ (TSV, p. 63) There is not only a process of juxtaposition of various items of different origins creating a strong comic spirit, but there is also the very phenomenon of ‗palimpsest‘27; in other words, the stratification of cultures and knowledge which conceals hybridity instead of showing it. It is accordingly the character‘s or the reader‘s mission to unveil it. In The Moor’s Last Sigh28 (MLS), there is a long quest for a stolen painting—the one which gives the novel its title—in a foreign country, Spain. But the character‘s quest turns to be a long search for his own origins. Indeed, Zogoiby discovers that his ancestors were from Jewish, Muslim and Christian background. Moraes‘s identity is then a condensation of levels in the same way the painting, he lastly found, is composed of multiple layers. The origin is buried deep inside so as to be exhumed, dug out ―there was no doubt that the canvas was a palimpsest‖ (MLS, p. 416). Consequently the establishment of meaning is just a matter of hybrid construction, an archeological enterprise, what Michel Foucault calls ―the archeology of knowledge‖. The relationship between the signified and the signifier is unsettled, as the relation between text and reader is made interactive and discursive. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved : perhaps our sense of what is the case constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death29.

The activity of reading is basically fragmentary, because when we read we select, we excise, we keep in memory only fragments of a text, which are never the same from reader to reader. The text has no central point of reference that anchors a universal and transcendental meaning. The reader is constantly challenged into an unfamiliar territory where he or she has to build his own subjective text, as Saleem puts it ―to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world‖ (MC, p. 126). The action of swallowing is reminiscent of Saleem‘s culinary metaphor of pickling the narrative so as to preserve it from alteration and disappearance ―to pickle is to give immortality […] the art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind‖ (MC, p. 461). The text becomes a mixture, an unreliable means of understanding the world because its ‗flavour‘ changes throughout time, and will never be 26

Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when sick for love She stood in tears amid the alien corn. Stanza 7. 27 The relationship between the real and the fictional is sometime a matter of vertical construction which finally collapses altogether: ―As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to come back with change‖. (Shame, p. 87-88) (our emphasis) 28 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, London : Jonathan Cape, 1995. 29 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 12.

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tasted in the same way ―the process of revision‖ Saleem insists, ―should be constant and endless‖ (MC, p. 460). The reader is then both a consumer and a producer of texts. The artist uses ingredients not only from the scented blends of cinnamon and ginger but also from the dirty, chaotic and fragmentary ordinary day to create an art which transforms its origins but does not lose sight of it. In Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce lets the reader swim in a lake of jokes, advertising slogans, slang and serious sermons. The artist knows that the highest goal is just hidden in the lowest substance. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the narrator calls himself ―Bastard, a smelly shit‖ (MLS, p. 104). This type of language which belongs to carnival profanation, mingling the lofty and the low, is a way of combining a postcolonial admiration for Indian diversity with a Western postmodern endorsement of the polysemantic nature of language. The blending of different languages30, ranging from Hindi to Urdu and from French to Latin, of registers and levels of language does not prevent English from assuming a definitive ascendancy as a privileged means of expression even if it is hybridized and pidginized. Using Ssisodia‘s stammering—he is a filmmaker in The Satanic Verses —Rushdie playfully and implicitly stresses the polysemantic aspect of language as a flawed discourse. ‗The pipi PR people‘, Sosodia told Gibreel on the phone, ‗think that such fufufuck, function, which is to be most ista ista istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their bibuild up cacampaign‘ (TSV, p. 421)

The words ―function‖ and ―studded‖ are decomposed so as to give birth to too new other words ―fuck‖ and ―ista‖. The first one is English, the second is Spanish. The hydridation of language is undoubtedly that of the centre. The word London is for instance decomposed and becomes Ellowen Deeowen, the title of the third chapter of The Satanic Verses. We go as far as the creation of language, the primitive formation of words out of scattered letters, to ―name the unnamable‖ (TSV, 97). Moreover, the word is split into two halves ―Ellowen‖ and ―Deeowen‖. London, the imperial center, the epitome of wealth and power, is also referred to as ―BabyLondon‖ so as to share the downfall of Babylon and become ―the habitation of devils‖ (Rev. 18.2). It is also Alphaville31, Mahagonny32, as Britain is refereed to as Vilayet33 or Wogland. The multiplicity of signifiers stems from Rushdie‘s sheer linguistic inventiveness which produces neologisms whose uncomfortable conjunctions expose the contradictions inherent in the original word, ―Bungledish‖ for Bangladesh and ―Gracekali‖ instead of Grace Kelly, as an allusion to the Hindu divinity of destruction ‗Kali‘. Western archetype of beauty is associated with a black divinity. Similarly Rushdie strings words together the effect of which is to undermine the conventional distinction between them: ―angelicdevilish‖ ―Gibreelsaladin‖ ―Marxlenin‖. Many other neologisms appear in all Rushdie‘s texts, like ―hibberti-gibberti‖ (TSV, p. 12) (deriving from the word flibbertigibbet, meaning a foolish woman); ―glum chum‖, ―moochy pooch‖ (TSV, p. 249) ; ―tarty-farty‖ (TSV p. 284), ―mumbo-jumbo‖ etc. By placing the monologic discourses of Islam and nationalism within the polyglossic and heteroglossic discourse of fiction, Rushdie is able to make seemingly impossible connections. He makes skillful use of black comedy to undercut the serious tone which religious and political discourses employ most of the time. The confusion between the real and the fictional is due to his multiple use of the same proper names. 30

―Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of judging languages‖ Salman Rushdie, The Salon Interview, at http://www.salon.com/06/features/interview2.html 31 One of Jean-Luc Godard‘s films, released in 1965, and depicting a dehumanised futuristic city. 32 From Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill‘s musical, The Decline and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930. 33 Literally, ―foreign country‖.

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Rushdie takes from Islamic history Ayesha, the name of the Prophet's favorite wife, and uses the same name for the most popular of the prostitutes in the Jahilia brothel, for the Muslim visionary who led her fellow villagers from Tiltipur to drown in the sea, and for one of the girl prostitutes in London. Sacred and profane versions of womanhood become fused and impossible to tell apart by this linguistic sleight of hand. Whereas all the Ayeshas exist in Gibreel's dreams, the name of Gibreel's lover, Alleluia Cone, who belongs to the waking world, becomes metamorphosed via her nickname, Allie, to Al-Lat, the goddess denounced by Mahound. She is also transmuted into Mount Cone (the equivalent to Mount Hira in Islamic tradition) which Mahound ascends to receive the words of Allah, both of which appear in Gibreel's dreams. Many other characters share their name with characters who belong to a different narrative sequence, such as Mishal, Hind, and Salman, Mahound's scribe. Metamorphosis: the Body as the locus of hybridity In his texts, Rushdie challenges the English/European/white sense of identity. He dismisses its claim to centrality. People of traditional Anglo-Saxon stock are almost absent from the London of The Satanic Verses. Instead the city swarms with immigrants: Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, German Jews, etc. He reminds the English that they too were colonized by the Romans and the Normans. When Saladin Chamcha is beaten by the police officers, he is no less English than they, but his identity as a postcolonial immigrant transforms him into a perfect alien. In the same time, Rushdie does not seek to privilege immigrants as somehow morally or culturally superior. They are all flawed characters but engaged into a long and difficult quest for identity in a foreign country. Saladin‘s metamorphosis into a demon with hoofs, horns, and tail; Saleem‘s disintegrating body in Midnight’s Children, Moraes‘s freaky appearance, having a clublike right hand and a metabolism that dooms him to live ―double quick‖, aging twice as fast as ordinary human beings; are but few examples of how the migrant is both a fragile and vulnerable being. His fragility is part of his hybridity, of being born across. To change country means in The Satanic Verses to pass through an alteration which is so profound that it is assimilated to a new rebirth. A migrant undoubtedly carries a great part of his past some of which is inevitably lost34. One of his urgent tasks in the new country is to invent the ground beneath his feet, to turn the old vanished certainties into hybrid constructs. It is then the very questions of survival and compromise which are underlined in Rushdie‘s texts. For both Saladin and Gibreel, life in the west means unbearable disruptions. If Saladin is divided between his homelessness and his desire to embrace an English identity by breaking with his cultural heritage, Gibreel becomes schizophrenic, torn between belief and doubt. First, Saladin‘s transformation into goat-hoofed Satan is closely linked to his status as a migrant. The devil is in fact the foremost representative of the hybrid character. Chamcha had grown to a height of over eight feet, and from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours, yellow from left, and from the right, black. He was no longer wearing clothes. His bodily hair had grown thick and long, his tail was swishing angrily, his eyes were a pale but luminous red, and he had succeeded in terrifying the entire temporary population of the bed and breakfast establishment to the point of incoherence. (TSV, p. 291)

Saladin‘s monstrous body conceals an obvious trait of falseness and imitation. He is ―the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice‖ (TSV, p. 443), but without a voice of his own. 34

In Shame, Omar Khayyam Shakil uses the metaphor of translation to foster his hybridity: ―I, too, am a translated man. I have been born across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion – and use, in evidence, the success of Fitzgerald-Khayyam – that something can also be gained. (S., p. 29). Omar Khayyam Shakil is the offspring of an impossible union of three Pakistani sisters and an English officer. He is described as a monstrous and peripheral individual, an anti-hero.

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His multiplicity of voices partakes of the establishment of a polyphonic novel, basically multivoiced. Saladin is therefore doomed to remain a collection of indeterminate and anonymous voices, ―such a fool‖ Zeenat Vakil, his wife, remarks, ―you, the big star whose face is the wrong colour for their colour TVs‖ (TSV, p. 61). Because of the colour of his skin he is not allowed to show himself, he can only be heard on radio and commercials: ―he made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas‖ (TSV, 60). Rushdie believes that it is just the Other‘s—namely the natives‘— perception of the migrant as a monstrous being that makes him so35. Saladin‘s hybridity is unbearably painful. His carefully captured English language betrays him and he finds himself relapsing into the Bombay lilt. Zeenat repeatedly denounces his artificiality and his slave mentality ―your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don‘t think it‘s perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache‖ (TSV, p. 53). Saldin is aware of his fragility when he realizes, after his fall from the hijacked plane, that he has a glass skin ready to fall apart. When he decides to go back to India, at the end of the novel, he recovers his original name and, like Rushdie, renews his relation with his agonizing father as a sign of reconciliation with the origin. He is now able to face a new beginning. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem, whose name means ‗the pure‘, is paradoxically the child of a Hindu aya and a departing Englishman. He is brought up by a wealthy Muslim Kashmiri-descended family, and being born on the very stroke of midnight in the first hour of Indian independence, his fate will forever be entwined with that of India. Saleem‘s body actually falls in decay and disintegrates into millions of fragments. This final fragmentation comes as a consequence of too much history, of the imposition of a totalitarian system embodied by the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, referred to as the Black Widow. A system which refuses compromise and denies differences. The threat to India, Rushdie asserts, comes from those who want to define it as homogeneous. Nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk's tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumbernosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had battered him until he was halfsenseless; with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black Angel. (MC, p. 447).

Saleem could not bear the multitude of persons he has been all at once: ―I am the sum total of everything‖ (MC, p. 383) ―I have been so-many too-many persons‖ (MC, p. 263). Saleem belongs to the magical world of midnight children. This generation of children who strongly believed in the prospect of a better future within an independent India, unexpectedly lose their magic when they are confronted to the destructive forces of history: ―Drained, I have been drained. The ―parahansa grounded‖ (MC, p. 295). The reference to the mythical bird, parahansa, endows Saleem with mythological roots. Saleem actually identifies himself a couple of time with parahansa, the bird which has the ability to live ―in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight‖ (MC, p. 218). He also sees himself related to Ganesh, the Hindu God who has a human body and an elephant head. Its trunk is compared to Saleem‘s nose. He becomes the Buddha as well. But he finally disappears like oblivious dust as if he has never existed.

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―When Saladin Chamcha finds himself transformed into a goatish, horned and hoofy demon, in a bizarre sanatorium full of other monstrous beings, he‘s told that they are all, like him, aliens and migrants, demonized by the ‘host culture’s’ attitude to them […] If migrant groups are called devils by others, that does not really make them demonic. And if devils are not necessarily devilish, angels may not necessarily be angelic…from this premise, the novel‘s exploration of morality as internal and shifting (rather than external, divinely sanctioned, absolute) may be said to merge‖ (our emphasis). Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit., p. 402-403.

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The limits of hybridity In Rushdie‘s texts, hybridity is a deliberate act, it juxtaposes the most contradictory and conflicting viewpoints and makes them respond to each other. Nothing is resolved or rounded-off for the text resists closure. Being a complex process of debunking absolutes, Rushdie‘s hybridity is as much a source of creative multiplicity as of tension and misunderstandings. The rejection of The Satanic Verses by Muslim readers is symptomatic of the way emerging cultures, where the art of the novel is not perceived and appreciated in the same way as in the West, receive literary texts. The novel‘s hegemony is not recognized as such, it is rather labeled as one of the many manifestations of orientalism. According to Edward Said, orientalism is a strongly monological discourse, whereas Rushdie‘s texts, I believe, promote carnivalestic plurality of voices and describe a lot of situations where elements from different cultures meet. Furthermore, the appeal to multiplicity, with which much of the time we all find ourselves in sympathy, may appear out of place when faced with the necessity to take a unitary stand on subjects like the Thatcher government's immigration policy or religious fundamentalism. In addition, the hybridity that Rushdie calls for does not correspond to the status and role of literary discourse in Muslim countries where transcendental truth and scriptures hold a central position. From a postcolonial36 point of view, Rushdie, in spite of his Indo-Pakistani origins and the fact that he call himself ―a bastard child of history37‖, belongs more to the center of the dominant culture when considered in terms of class and wealth. It is equally this same history that crushes under its totalizing power Saleem Sinai and the 1001 children of midnight. Rushdie curiously refuses to adopt any easy position in the post-colonial debate, because he places himself on both sides of its divide. He writes in English while denouncing its inaccuracy when applied to some local concepts. The narrator of Shame38 is not satisfied with the English word ―Shame‖ as a translation for the Urdu word ―Sharam‖. This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners‘ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so for ever alter what is written… Sharam, that‘s the word. For which this paltry ‗shame‘ is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, Shin rè mim (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sound. […] but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterpart. (S, p. 38-39) (our emphasis)

The narrator—who‘s also writing his autobiography—feels forced, as if he was subject to a form of cultural containment, to use English language in spite of its inappropriateness to describe the very notion of shame ―this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners‘ unrepented past‖. The trace of the colonial past is impossible to erase. Is linguistic hybridity now fully and acceptably justified which may enable Rushdie to discern in both dominant and emergent cultures the same desire to appropriate the truths for themselves? 36

For further details, see Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myth of the Nation, New York, Macmillan, 1989. Rushdie is described as a ―Third-World cosmopolitan‖ having an inside understanding of the Third World, but who is also able to appeal to First-World literary tastes. 37 ―Throughout human history, the apostle of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours when you cook‖, Imaginary Homelands, p. 394. 38 Salman Rushdie, Shame, London : Picador in association with Jonathan Cape, 1984.

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Rushdie‘s texts are ambivalent in such a way as to leave little or no room for alternative readings for fiction is made to dissolve into a fragmentary and endlessly deferred series of signifiers. Fiction becomes fission with no nucleus in sight. The caricatured figure of the Imam swallowing the armies of his supporters in The Satanic Verses helps challenging Islamic fundamentalism, as the American evangelist Eugene Dumsday allows the undermining of Christian fundamentalism. British (the burning of Maggy‘ wax effigy) and Indian racism (Hindu nationalism) are both put into question. Even Baal, the satirist poet, whose verses are said to be mightier than the sword, the very representative of literary discourse, is ridiculed as he grows old, writing only poems which celebrate degeneration and loss39. Salman the Persian, the shrewd scribe, is finally charged with blasphemy and condemned to death by Mahound ―Your blasphemy Salman‖ the prophet says, ―can‘t be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn‘t work it out ? To set your words against the Words of God‖. (TSV, p. 374). Salman is first found stinking of alcohol with a whore he could not pay up, but he is finally spared. His survival is not attributed to any clemency of the new religion of Submission, he just proposes a compromise to Mahound, by informing against the poet Baal, his former accomplice. Within the postmodern condition, Rushdie‘s texts incorporate those totalizing discourses they oppose, ostensibly throwing all proclaimed truths into question. Fictional discourse, like knowledge, is necessarily contaminated by its desire to dominate. Whenever Rushdie comments upon his novels, he tends to adopt a unitary attitude to the dogma of Islamic fundamentalism and Thatcherite racism. What is omitted is any clear acknowledgment on Rushdie‘s part of this contradiction between his defence of his unitary stance as commentator of his own work and the creative plurality lying at the center of his imaginative fiction. Consequently, between the unbearable lightness of his style, the satirical tone of his narratives, and the need to have a clear stand, there is a gap which should probably be bridged. Let me be clear: I am not trying to say that The Satanic Verses is ‗only a novel‘ and thus need not to be taken seriously, even disputed with the utmost passion. I do not believe that novels are trivial matters. The ones I care most about are those which attempt radical reformulation of language, form and ideas, those that attempt to do what the word novel seems to insist on: to see the world anew. I am well aware that this can be a hackle-raising, infuriating attempt.40 (our emphasis)

Postmodernism is a morass of deferred solutions on every level, refusing to ponder either origins or ends, bringing forward ambiguities, denying oppositional approaches. For Simon During ―post-colonialism is‖ on the contrary, ―regarded as the need, in nations or groups which have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images41‖. He also claims that ―for the post-colonial to speak or write in the imperial tongues is to call forth a problem of identity, to be thrown into mimicry and ambivalence‖ (p. 43). There is an implicit clash in the two positions. While postmodernism is said to embrace cultural relativity, post-colonialism normally prioritizes non-Western cultural diversity. In short, if post-colonial writing is generally characterized by its resistance to the values and ideology of the metropolitan center and assumes specific political positions, postmodernism goes out of its way to relativize them altogether.

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―It led him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of classical purity and images of love were constantly degraded by the intrusion of elements of farce‖. (370) 40 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, op. cit, p. 393. 41 Simon During, ―Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today‖, Textual Practice, p. 33.

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Undecidability is the only means of understanding realities — deferred allusions and misreadings create multiple perspectives suggesting the unreliability of the text as a means of presenting the past as real42.

How should we regard then Rushdie‘s tendency to indeterminacy and ambivalence if novels should be taken seriously? Why do postmodern hybridity and fragmentation make it preferable to a unitary master narrative which becomes unavoidably decentred? Couldn‘t we consider Rushdie‘s fictional discourse as an out of harm's way opportunity to counter all the supposedly totalitarian systems without being accountable for his own opinions or his characters‘. Why should non-Western readers adhere to the art of the novel as the avatar of the freedom of expression, an art which is not part of their literary history and which does not mirror their beliefs and culture? All these various questions will certainly give way to equally diverse and contradictory answers, but we can at least finally venture Rushdie‘s texts have the same truth-value as those discourses they set out to undermine.

Works cited Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. ―Postmodernist Strategies of Liberation in the Works of Salman Rushdie‖, Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 23, N° 1, 1988 Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam, Routledge: London and New York, 1992. Akhtar, Shabbir. Be Careful With Muhammad!, London: Bellew, 1989 Appignanesi, Lisa and Sara Maitland (ed.) The Rushdie File, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: Minnosota. UP, 1984. Birch David, ―Postmodernist Chutneys‖, Textual Practice, 1991, vol. 5, n° 1. Brecht, Bertolt and Kurt Weill. The Decline and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myth of the Nation, New York, Macmillan, 1989. During, Simon. ―Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today‖, Textual Practice, vol. 1, n° 1, 1987, 32-47. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism, History, Theory, Fiction, London: Routledge, 1990. Keats, John. Ode to a Nightingale, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979, p. 827. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998 Rushdie Salman. ―In Good Faith‖, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991, London: Granta Book, 1991. Rushdie Salman. Imaginary Homelands : Essays and criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta Book, 1991. Rushdie Salman. Midnight’s Children, London : Picador in association with Jonathan Cape, 1982. Rushdie, Salman. Shame, London : Picador in association with Jonathan Cape, 1984. Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh, London : Jonathan Cape, 1995. Rushdie, Salman. The Salon Interview, http://www.salon.com/06/features/interview2.html Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses, London : Viking Penguin, 1988. Wood, Michael. ―Shenanigans‖, London Review of Books 7 Sept., 1995, vol. 3, N° 5,

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David Birch, ―Postmodernist Chutneys‖, Textual Practice, 1991, vol. 5, n° 1, p. 2.

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