METODOLOGIA

Titus Pop works at Partium Christian University in Oradea, Romania.

Abstract:

The content of this paper is a detailed presentation of Rushdie’s lifelong claim for a hy-brid world in his non-fiction work. His non-fictional works, Imaginary Homelands and his more recent essay collection Step Across This Line ofer enough evidence that Rushdie’s lifelong preoccupation is an endless claim for a frontierless, hybrid world.

The first non-fiction volume, Imaginary Homelands, brings many of the essays he wrote between 1981-1991 together with the several major statements he has written in the wake of The Satanic Verses to form an extraordinary intellectual autobiography. The de-liberately hybrid, mongrel, multireferential nature of the literary and experiential inheri-tance that Rushdie claims, not just from East and West but from all corners of the world, is an exciting guide for detecting literary footprints in his work but obstructs any attempt to define a national or literary influence for it. Rushdie, whose entire career is based on the questioning of historical givens and beliefs, uses the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of rootlessness and hybridity. His claim for hybridity is even more nuanced in his latest volume of essays entitled Step Across this Line. There are speeches, columns, letters that use a hard-won authority to denounce repression, censorship, fa-naticism and, more shakily, religion of all kinds. His fight against fundamentalism and for freedom of expression is a recurrent theme and it is clearly articulated in many essays.

Over the course of the collection, Rushdie is a Muslim, Indian, New Yorker, Briton, Euro-pean, American, trans-nationalist, post-nationalist, internationalist, immigrant and exile.

Salman Rushdie’s non-fictional works, Imaginary Homelands and his more recent essay collection Step Across This Line ofer enough evidence that Rushdie’s lifelong preoccupation is an endless claim for a frontierless, hybrid world. Even before The Satanic Verses provoked international contro-versy, Rushdie had established himself as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain. His second novel, Midnight’s Children (1980), was awarded the prestigious Booker prize;

his third, Shame (1983), was also highly praised. Throughout the 1980s, Rushdie also wrote journal articles and essays,

eloquently and often- about the politics of religion and race in Margaret Thatch-er’s Britain, Indira Gandhi’s India, and Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan; about writers and books from India and Pakistan, Africa, Britain, Europe, South America, and the United States; about the vocation of the writer and the powers of literature, the potential of the imagination and the dangers of censorship; and, repeat-edly, about migration as the archetypal experience of the twentieth century. In his journal articles such as “The New Empire within Britain,” “She [Margaret Thatcher] Has Persuaded the Nation That Everything Which Goes Wrong Is

an Act of God,” and “The Council [subsi-dized] Housing That Kills,” he is clearly concerned with contemporary political issues in Britain such as the problems faced by new immigrants from Com-monwealth countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean or by the poor in general who must rely on subsidized housing.

Other articles comprise more or less literary, political or religious issues but they are all pervaded by a sense of irony so peculiar to Rushdie.

His main non-fiction work consists of three volumes of essay and journal col-lections and travel writings: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands and Step Across This Line. The Jaguar Smile was published in 1987 and it was written when Rushdie took a break from writing The Satanic Verses the year before and visited Nicaragua as a guest of the San-dinista Association of Cultural Workers.

This visit took place shortly after “the In-ternational Court of Justice in the Hague had ruled that US aid to la Contra, the counterrevolutionary army the CIA had invented, assembled, organized, and armed, was in violation of international law. Rushdie is quite severe in his criti-cism of his hosts over the closure of the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and is not by any means ready to accept, either face to face or in his subsequent written account, all the justifications they put forward for that and other question-able policies. He is honest, too, about how badly served Nicaraguans are by their government-controlled media and consequently how ill-informed they are about the rest of the world. He reports that, listening to him and a visiting Rus-sian novelist discuss Soljenitzyn’s The

Gulag Archipelago, Nicaraguan writers present were incredulous at what they were hearing. ‘How could such things be’ they asked. (Rushdie, 2000, p. 99) Nevertheless, as one born in a nation that had thrown of the British yoke, Rushdie’s natural sympathies lay with the Nicaraguans. He found that he actu-ally liked and admired the members of the government he met as human be-ings. “For the first time in my life,” he writes, “I realized with surprise, I had come across a government I could sup-port, not faute de mieux, but because I wanted its eforts (at survival, at build-ing the nation, and at transformbuild-ing it) to succeed” (70).

Imaginary Homelands brings many of the essays he wrote between 1981-1991 together with the several ma-jor statements he has written in the wake of The Satanic Verses to form an extraordinary intellectual autobiog-raphy. There are those who find--in his wealthy middle-class Indian fam-ily background, his upper-class English education, his very English accent, and even his pale skin--too many barriers to his really understanding or represent-ing the underprivileged, whether from the third or the first world .In between, as this thick book reveals, Rushdie’s pen almost never ceased its frenetic scrib-bling. His thoughts meandered widely:

from migration, religion, esteemed col-leagues, travel, India, Pakistan, England, the United States, racism, gambling, and film. The themes he explores in his nov-els also manifest themselves through-out this book’s twelve sections.

The deliberately hybrid, mongrel, multireferential nature of the

liter-ary and experiential inheritance that Rushdie claims, not just from East and West but from all corners of the world, is an exciting guide for detecting liter-ary footprints in his work, but obstructs any attempt to define a national or lit-erary influence for it. Rushdie himself is scarcely any help. In the title essay -”Imaginary Homelands,” he suggests that migrancy, either as a literal or lit-erary (imaginative) experience, has marked writers as diverse as Borges, Heinrich Boll, Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, and Machado de Assis. Unargu-able as the list is, it becomes disturbing when Rushdie claims similar experienc-es of displacement and minority status, thus losing the political charge and de-mographic scale that marks twentieth-century migration from the periphery to the metropolitan world:

Let me suggest that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradi-tion, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political his-tory of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group.

We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Ram-mohun Roy. America, a nation of immi-grants, has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural trans-plantation.... it may be that by discover-ing what we have in common with those who preceded us into this country, we can do the same. (1991, p. 20)

Migration—losing one country, lan-guage, and culture and finding oneself

forced to come to terms with another place, another way of speaking and thinking, another view of reality—is Rushdie’s great theme. Metamorpho-sis is its metaphor. And reflections on migration and metamorphosis perme-ate these essays as thoroughly as em-bodiments of them populate his novels, making many of these pieces essential statements about contemporary urban society’s conflicts. The troublesome is-sue of race in immigration has been elided entirely by Rushdie in this ode to the pleasures of migrancy. The “free-doms of the literary migrant,” (Ibid., p.

21) as he calls them later in the same essay, scarcely include defining the pro-cess of race relations in Britain as a mat-ter of cultural transplantation or the discovery of common cause between an Indian grocer and long-dead lights of English literature. What Rushdie is doing is arrogating to himself a cultural tradition based on an elite education system, both in Britain and India, and using this tradition to speak prescrip-tively for a very diverse set of people.

Even if one discounts some of his pro-nouncements as so much rhetorical pomposity, it is not untroubling when he compares his situation to West-ern writers who have been “eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form ... raiding the visual storehouses of Af-rica, Asia, the Philippines,” and insists that “we must grant ourselves an equal freedom” (20). It is surely no news to Rushdie that artistic eclecticism, as he chooses to call it, was also related to the

“raiding” of colonies by Western coun-tries. In this case, the concept of “equal freedom” is not just ideologically

repul-sive but impossible. While the implicit point of Rushdie’s argument here is the justifiable claim that writers should not have to be held to any literal accounting of national origins and traditions, and that a diverse set of influences shapes a postcolonial writer’s imagination, this argument elides the diferences between migrants. Rushdie, whose en-tire career is based on the questioning of historical givens and beliefs, invokes the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of rootlessness and hybridity.

The book’s title essay discusses exile from country and culture and the alien-ation of the dislocated writer. The past remains elusive enough, never mind the half-remembered mores and social codes of one’s lost homeland. These themes remain fundamental to Rush-die’s work. After excoriating the mur-der of Indira Gandhi, adumbrating the Nehru-Gandhi “dynasty”, the discussion moves, briefly, to pros and cons of Paki-stan. Resurgence of British imperialist ideology during the Thatcher years dis-turbs Rushdie in the scathing “Outside the Whale” and “Attenborough’s Gan-dhi.” On similar lines, “The New Empire Within Britain,” apparently a transcript of a widely distributed videotape, de-constructs British racism (p. 127). The bulk of the book comprises numerous literary reviews, most of which run be-tween two to five pages. While stream-ing through these, readers will learn that Rushdie appreciates, among other things, Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day,”

Calvino’s work in general, Marquez’s

“Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and Pyn-chon’s “Vineland.” Also, perhaps more

interestingly, readers will discover that Rushdie was not particularly impressed by Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, Var-gas Llosa’s “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus,” and Naipaul’s “Among the Believers.” The reviews read quickly, but the longer es-says require more concentration. One of these, “In God We Trust,” examines vo-luminous topics, including the religious versus the nationalistic atmosphere of 1990, the emergence of “reality” from imagination, and the creeping malaise of the United States

When reading the collection, what one may efortlessly notice is Rush-die’s frequent and recurring claim for multiculturalism and plurality. Thus, in his third essay called ‘The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987, he as-serts his view on ideology. Vehemently opposing the ideologies of communali-ties that dominated the political scene in India after Independence, a position he first nuanced in his masterpiece The Midnight’s Children, he writes:’ My In-dia has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity, ideas to which the ideologies of the commu-nalities are diametrically opposed (p.

32). Later, when commenting on the ill-fated Indira Ghandhi, who had been butchered in 1984 by a fundamentalist, he reiterated his view:

a nation of seven hundred millions to make any kind of sense must base itself firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance of devolution and decentralization wherever possi-ble. There can be no one way-religious, cultural or linguistic-of being an Indian.

Let diference reign. (p. 44)

In another essay entitled ‘Common-wealth Literature does not exist’ where he arguably opposes the label ‘common-wealth literature’ given to postcolonial literature by the ‘Orientalist’ scholars, Rushdie pleads for the need for the preeminence of hybridity over purity.

After rejecting the so-called ‘authentic-ity’ plea required by the school of ‘com-monwealth literature’, considering the quest for national authenticity as rath-er belonging to religious extremists, he calls for an eclectic cultural enterprise by bringing as an argument in favor of his claim the Indian culture which is a mixed culture:

A mélange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary Coca-Cola American. To say nothing of Muslim, Bhudist, Jain, Christian, Jewish, French, Portuguese, Marxist, Maoist, Trotskiist,, 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, and today it is at the centre of the best work being done both in the visual arts and in literature. Yes, eclecti-cism is not a really nice word in the lexi-con of ‘commonwealth literature’. So the reality of the mixed tradition is replaced by the fantasy of purity (p. 67).

Arguably, the book’s most memorable piece, the one that will stick to people’s psyches, is “In Good Faith.” In almost twenty pages, the author defends The Satanic Verses against charges of inso-lence, literary brutality, and heresy

Rushdie’s claim for pluralism and hy-bridity is even more nuanced in his lat-est volume of essays entitled Step Across

this Line .The range of topics covered in these essays, reviews, lectures, and med-itations impresses us with the breadth of Rushdie’s knowledge: he moves with ease from contemporary Lebanese nov-elists to sixteenth-century Indian epic literature, from Vaclav Havel to Bob Dy-lan. The exuberance with which he en-gages every topic attests to the wonders he can accomplish with his prose. Rush-die deserves a place alongside Nabokov and Joyce as a pyrotechnic master of twentieth-century English, and one who happily cannonades through many of these pieces. But his gifted prose is, unfortunately, also his curse. Rushdie is a paragon of the postmodern mindset;

as engaged by Dorothy in Oz as by the destruction in 9/11, he is willing and able to pass between cultural registers and diverse subjects with an insouciant disregard for the relative value of the insights ofered, the consistency of his arguments, or the durability of his com-mitments. There are speeches, columns, letters that use a hard-won authority to denounce repression, censorship, fanat-icism and, more shakily, religion of all kinds. There are accounts of his life in hiding; also gratitude for Britain’s pro-tection uncomfortably juxtaposed with indignation at her caution in speaking out for him.

Rushdie begins this second collection with a brilliant thirty-page take on The Wizard of Oz -”that great rarity, a film that improves on the good book from which it came”, a film “whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults”(2002:4). This is followed by nearly seventy shorter essays on subjects as diverse as censorship,

pho-tography, rock music, leavened bread and adapting for film. The first section ends with “A Dream of Glorious Return”, a diary of his June 2000 visit to India with his son: ‘This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never really leave.’(p. 226)

The dialectic home and away, a recur-rent theme in his writing appears once again in the very first essay from the volume called ‘Out of Kansas’ and which is an impressive comment on the film The Wizard of Oz, a film which deeply impressed Rushdie:

Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’s notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler-East, West, home’s best-would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up to-wards the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is the tension between these two dreams (p. 14).

On the whole, this essay is a charm-ing meditation on ‘’The Wizard of Oz,’’

which the author regards as a movie about the joys of going away, of ‘leav-ing the grayness and enter‘leav-ing the color.

(15) In Dorothy and The Wizard he sees the condition if the immigrant:

These two immigrants, Dorothy and the Wizard have adopted opposite strat-egies of survival in the new strange land.

Dorothy has been unfailingly polite,

careful, courteously ‘small and meek’;

whereas the Wizard has been fire and smoke, bravado and bombast, and has hustled his way to the top-floated there, so to speak on a current of his own hot air. But Dorothy learns that meekness isn’t enough, and the Wizard-as his bal-loon gets the better of him for a second time-that his command of hot air isn’t all it should be. It’s hard for a migrant like me not to see in these shifting desti-nies a parable of the migrant condition.

(p. 30)

Later on, in the same essay, when mentioning the crowning of Dorothy and her becoming actual from imagi-nary, Rushdie draws a parallel between Oz and his dream world:

So Oz finally became home; the imag-ined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’ but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: ex-cept, of course, for the home we make, of the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere, and everywhere, ex-cept the place which we began.(p. 33)

In other essays, he is preoccupied with the contemporary polemics

In other essays, he is preoccupied with the contemporary polemics