• modernism (early 20th c.): breaks with
artistic traditions and conventions,
experimentation
• with time the experiment becomes
conventional
• countereffect: pre-modernist writing
reshaped
cf. Fowles (pastiche, invention)
• No clear barrier between modernism
and post-modernism
(cultural history: palimpsest)
Fiction and reality
”We are all in flight from the real reality.”
Modernist fiction – epistemological uncertainties:
How do we know?
Postmodernist fiction –
ontological uncertainties:
Which is the real world?
Historical fiction: Real compared to what?
language: not a passive reflection (imitation) of the world,
but active modelling.
Representation:
History (and also nature) is conveyed as it is organized in
accordance with cultural conventions.
Fact or fiction?
Hayden White: history is a narrative
historians create / reveal the connections among
events
common features of history and fiction
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
(b. 19 June 1947)
अहमद सलम न र शदी
‫احمد سلمان رشدی‬
Salman Rushdie
• born in Bombay (Mumbai), on 19 June, 1947
in a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent
• both him and his father were educated in Cambridge
• worked for advertising agencies before becoming a full time
writer
• 1981: success of Midnight’s Children
• 1989: Khomeini’s fatwa for Satanic Verses (2,8 m USD)
failed assassination attempts (Paddington bombing), hiding
diplomatic tension with Iran
• 2007: knighthood
• in popular culture: U2, Bridget Jones’s Diary,
4th wife model/actress Padma Lakshmi
• movie version of Midnight’s Children (dir: Deepa Mehta)
released in 2012
Grimus (1975)
Midnight's Children (1981)
Shame (1983)
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
The Satanic Verses (1988)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)
Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and V. S. Naipaul)
East, West (1994)
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
Fury (2001)
Shalimar the Clown (2005)
The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)
Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
• India not present in English (Victorian) literature
all aspects of English life – accept that it is an empire
• exception: Rudyard Kipling
cf. Peter Walsh in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924)
since mid-20th c.: English literature -> literature(s) in English
plurality of writings
post-colonial literature: shift from centre to periphery
”pressures on culture from the imperium” (Edward Said)
orientalism: discourse of West about the East, an instrument of
power, ”a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern
over the Orient” (Orientalism, 1978)
Rushdie: authentical oriental (?)
[Aadam Aziz in Heidelberg] ”learned that India – like radium –
had been ‘discovered’ by the Europeans […] he
was somehow the invention of their ancestors”
‘Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see
to it.’
Bombay, where I grew up, was a city in which the West was
totally mixed up with the East. The accidents of my life have
given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of
the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously,
sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both—usually both.
Jack Livings, Interview with Salman Rushdie
magical realism only couleur locale ?
David Lodge on Magic Realism
When marvelous and impossible events occur in what
otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative […]
All of these writers have lived through great historical
convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they
feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of
undisturbed realism.
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992)
Gabriel García Márquez: Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Jorge Amado: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966)
Midnight’s Children (1981)
• story of independent India and Pakistan and the life of narrator
Saleem Sinai born at midnight, August 15, 1947,
simultaneously with the independence of his country;
• events of Saleem’s life coincide with major historical events on
the subcontinent (wars, state of emergency under Indira
Gandhi);
• story of Saleem’s family from 1915 to 1947 to 1978 with
disruption and restoration of straight line of succession (Saleem
a changeling, his bastard son, Aadam Sinai, by Major Shiva,
“true great-grandson of his great-grandfather”)
• physical disintegration of Saleem (loss of hair, finger, memory,
virility) and the disintegration of India
• cf. the fragmented nature of Aadam’s learning his future wife’s
body through the hole in the sheet
later: Amina learning to love his husband
‘At
this rate there will
always be something
fresh about him to
love; so our
marriage just can’t
go stale.’
Truth: universal and particular
”Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get
from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more
and more incredible.”
”Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that
I'm prepared to distort everything - to re-write the whole
history of my times purely in order to place myself in a
central role?”
”I've been the sort of person to whom things have been
done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing
himself as protagonist.”
Memory and its failures
Understanding and its failures
storytelling: narration problematised – Padma
‘…by day among the picklevats,
by night within these sheets, I
spend my time at the great work
of preserving. Memory, as well
as fruit, is being saved from the
corruption of the clock.’
•
‘But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into
the world of linear narrative, the universe of whathappened-next:
”At this rate” – Padma complains – ”you’ll be two
hundred years old before you manage to tell about your
birth.”
• pressures of ‘what-happened-nextism’
• ‘Padma has started getting irritated whenever my
narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an
incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the
strings.’ (cf. Fowles)
• betrayal:
•
history of independent India is a betrayal of hopes and
expectations;
Saleem’s betrayal of his generation
• various infidelities within the families
form: pattern of Arabian Nights
(Saleem-Padma: Scheherazade-King Shahryar);
• the fantastic and the grotesque:
Saleem’s ability to communicate with all the midnight’s
children; Reverend Mother dreaming others’ dreams
• political events summed up at almost journalistic level
religion
• India: Hindu and Muslim (Christian minority)
• ‘…he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between
belief and disbelief […] And he was knocked forever into that
middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he
could not wholly disbelieve.’
• ‘and as he aged and the world became less real he began to
doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in
whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve, he was
probably expecting to do so.’
• in modernism: existential crisis
in postmodernism: playfulnes with anything, condition of
doubt
denial of the existence of the sacred (vs. profane)
typical trouble in the communication between west & east