John Clement Ball, University of New Brunswick
In The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Salman Rushdie explores the tensions between inclusive and exclusive forms of Indian nationalism through the dynamic interplay of inclusive and exclusive forms of satire. Rushdie has been called a satirist in many discursive contexts, from jacket copy to critical articles and books, but the transforming effects of satiric modes of writing on his novels have yet to be fully linked to his political vision of the nation. This paper draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of satire and the grotesque to show how generic strategies work in tandem with political ideas in The Moor’s Last Sigh.
Since the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, Rushdie’s novels have been celebrated and interrogated as much for their portrayals of Indian and Pakistani politics as for their adventurous refashionings of the Indian novel in English. Recent criticism continues to emphasize the nation as a primary thematic focus and ontological category for Rushdie. Josna Rege argues that Midnight’s Children’s primary achievement was that it offered post-Emergency India “a new literary and conceptual model that opened new worlds of possibility for re-imagining and representing enabling relationships between individual and nation.”[1] For Jyotsna Singh, Rushdie destabilizes and pluralizes the category of “nation-in-formation” in Midnight’s Children, and continues this project in The Moor’s Last Sigh, where he “lays to rest all the comforting myths of postcolonial Indian nationalism.”[2] Paul Cantor argues that, by portraying Indian society through the lens of Moorish Spain in the latter novel, Rushdie “condemns efforts to impose a uniform culture on a nation and celebrates instead cultural hybridity.”[3] The tensions between unity and multiplicity (or consolidation and fragmentation) that animate Rushdie’s two major novels of India have both political and aesthetic dimensions: nation and novel are pulled in contradictory directions by opposing forces.
In its idealized form, Rushdie’s India resembles Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of an inclusive, pluralist secular democracy. For Rushdie, India’s strength is its multiplicity, its impurity, its ability to contain diverse and contradictory realities. His beloved Bombay, the nation’s most cosmopolitan city, exemplifies these qualities; in Midnight’s Children he coins the term “Bombayness” to encapsulate a whole value system.[4] Hinduism with its millions of gods, its fluid mythology, and its absorptive, transformative energies also serves as a touchstone for India’s inclusiveness—conceptually if not always in practice. In the realm of politics, inclusivity is the principle by which Rushdie judges things. The usual targets of his satire are movements, people, or conditions given to coercion, tyranny, hierarchic exclusion, or a simplifying search for purity. Hillel Halkin writes that in its critique of “the perils of monism,” The Moor’s Last Sigh is “a thematic sequel to The Satanic Verses,”[5] but he could have named any of Rushdie’s other novels, whose satiric targets are as varied as Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (in Midnight’s Children), elite Pakistani patriarchies (in Shame), and those who would censor stories (in Haroun and the Sea of Stories). In addition to being exclusive, self-serving, and ideologically narrow-minded, Rushdie’s satiric targets are also typically shown to be violent.
Satire is itself a kind of representational violence. And the dualistic rhetoric through which satirists most often (mis)represent the world is more inclined to judge and banish than to accommodate and include. Rushdie’s satire, especially in Shame, may therefore be seen to replicate textually the very qualities it critiques referentially.[6] But Rushdie’s handling of satire is complex, and his political vision can be understood best if we see his novels as energized by two countervailing forms of satiric energy. One is the conventional “negative” kind of satire mentioned above: satire as attack, as distorting critique of one or more referential somethings (or someones) located outside the text, fixed in (and by) the satirist’s hostile gaze.[7] The other is Menippean satire as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it: a dialogic, radically inclusive form marked by outrageously diverse combinations of things, ideas, people, societies, ontologies, narrative styles, and voices.
Bakhtin theorizes Menippean satire through his socially inclusive notion of carnival, from which he also develops his theory of the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, the grotesque offers an optimistic, enabling image of incompleteness; the physiological self transgresses its boundaries, becoming blended with the world and renewed. Bakhtin sets his rhapsodic view against traditional theories of the grotesque as embodying the alienating vision of what he calls the “negative” satirist; for Bakhtin, images of the grotesque body and its open apertures convey hope through the productive intermingling of realms. By grafting Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque onto his related but separately theorized idea of Menippean satire, we can generate a useful hybrid model which I have named “the Menippean grotesque.” As the positive counterpart of “negative” satire, it helps open up the political and generic tensions of inclusion and exclusion in Rushdie’s novels.[8]
Midnight’s Children, for instance, has the sort of fantastic, free-ranging plot and mixed style identified with Menippean satire. And as it inscribes India’s history onto Saleem’s body, it uses body images to suggest inclusive openness: Saleem as a “swallower of lives” has “consumed multitudes” (MC 11); history leaks into him, and his “mighty cucumber of a nose” (MC 152) leaks into the world in the early years when he has the greatest power and stature; these are also the years when India inspires the greatest optimism. When his nose becomes a conduit for the Midnight Children’s Conference, it offers great hope and potential to the nation, but it ultimately fails. Eventually, the enabling idea of leaking gives way to the imposed, unnatural assaults of draining. When Saleem’s nose is surgically drained he becomes disconnected from the multiple voices of community. Moreover, his body is increasingly “buffeted”; as history inscribes his body, it destroys his body. The most brutal bodily assault is the enforced sterilization of the midnight children during the Emergency, which Saleem calls “the draining-out of hope” (MC 421) for the nation. All of this is part of the satiric darkening of tone in Book Three. The novel traces several linked processes: post-independence optimism leads to authoritarian betrayal; valorized grotesque intermingling gives way to imposed violations of the body’s boundaries; the Menippean spirit wanes before the onslaught of a reality that no longer suits it, and a negative, attack-oriented satire takes its place. In terms of politics, imagery, and genre, the inclusive is overcome by the exclusive.
The Moor’s Last Sigh brings Midnight’s Children’s politics up to date. While reaffirming the Nehruvian idea of India as secular democracy, it moves past the crisis of governance of the 1975–77 Emergency and into the ideological crises of the 1980s and 1990s. For Rushdie, the rise of the religious right in that period is like “corrosive acid … poured into the nation’s bloodstream”[9]; it violates “the old, founding myth of the nation” (351) just as the Ram cult reduces polytheistic Hinduism to a religion in which “only one chap matters” (338). In his satire of an exclusive Hindu nationalism, Rushdie again makes the human body the main site where literal and metaphoric versions of the national health (or disease) are enacted. And again the body’s fluid dynamics (blood, food, poisons, breath) serve as markers of both an esteemed intermingling and the invasive, “purifying” violence that opposes admixture.
It is mainly through the narrator, Moraes, and his mother, Aurora, that these ideas are inscribed and negotiated. Moraes ages at double-speed, his rapid growth a metaphor for post-independence India (both in terms of population and development), and specifically Bombay: “Like the city itself,” he says, “I expanded without time for proper planning” (161–62). By birth, Moraes is a “mongrel” (172); a hybrid blend of Christian, Jewish, and possibly Arabic Muslim ancestry, he belongs to a demographically tiny minority. But if he can be seen as “a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait” (87), Moraes uses his marginality to make an ideological point. He resists essentialist group identities defined by “majority” and “minority” status: “Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one?” (87).
Bakhtin’s notion of the unfinished body blending into the world is contained in the novel’s title image: for the wheezy, asthmatic Moraes “A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can” (54). The inclusive interchange between realms is often translated from somatic to topographical space. “Bombayness” is conveyed here with the Haroun-like image of “an ocean of stories” (350)[10]: “In Bombay,” Moraes says, “all India met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins…. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea” (350). The novel is full of enabling images of opening up and interpenetration: teenage Aurora opening windows to “let in” Cochin’s multifarious world, however “dirtyfilthy” it may be (9); the Alhambra Palace of Spain as a “testament … to that most profound of our needs, to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self” (433).
Aurora embodies many traits valorized in the novel. Having invited “the torrential reality of India to awaken her soul” (45) in Cochin, she responds to Bombay with a similar openness: “she sucked in the city’s hot stenches, lapped up its burning sauces, she gobbled its dishes up whole” (128). Moraes begins to see her as the human “incarnation of the smartyboots metropolis” (139); in her carnivalesque annual performance on Chowpatty Beach she dances satirically against fundamentalist elements in Hindu culture from a position clearly aligned with inclusive, cosmopolitan “Bombayness.” Still, Aurora is not unequivocally idealized: as a mother she shows insufficient love, and in this novel the idea of love is overtly identified with Rushdie’s value system: “I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the no-man-is-an-island, two’s-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding Ones” (289). The actuality of Aurora’s love eventually fails to meet these standards: Aurora the “natural soloist” (159) makes her most profound impact on Moraes through an act of exclusion, irrevocably banishing him from her love and from the family when she and Moraes fall victim to Uma’s devastating trick.
Nonetheless, it is in Aurora’s paintings that Rushdie’s pluralist values find their most elaborate and original expression. Through ekphrasis, Rushdie puts into (or pulls out of) her images the aesthetic and moral perspectives from which he would have us read his novel. Full of grotesque figures fusing human and animal parts, with breasts for buttocks or whole bodies made from urban rubbish, Aurora’s teeming canvases signify a grand, all-encompassing vision. Her blending of realities is geographic as well as social. A key stage of her work’s development involves the Bombay landscape blending into an Arabian Seascape, with “strange composite creatures slither[ing] to and fro across the frontier of the elements” (226). As chief moral touchstone, Aurora’s canvases not only seem to be the visual equivalent of Rushdie’s encyclopedic, grotesque, magic-realist novels,[11] but they also help explain a unique feature of this particular novel. Her blurring of “the dividing line between two worlds” (226) is part of a grand merging and palimpsesting of worlds that both she and Rushdie perform to advance their more-or-less mutual idea of contemporary India as a type of Moorish Spain.
Before the tumultuous events of the late fifteenth century—the Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews, and the end of Moorish rule in Granada—the Iberian peninsula had for some time harbored a heterodox, accommodating society. Indeed, in its day medieval Spain comprised Western Europe’s most multiracial and religiously pluralist populace. Under tolerant Christian kings, three monotheistic groups (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) had coexisted, convinced that by believing in the same God they could live in peace. But from the thirteenth century on, they became increasingly segregated and hostile. An idea of limpienza de sangre, or blood purity, took hold; although its origins have been traced to Orthodox Jewry’s prohibition against mixed marriages, the idea was appropriated by Christians as a weapon against Jewish and Mudjehar (Moor) minorities.[12] The purist idea of Christian Spain promoted so fiercely by Ferdinand and Isabella identified the interests of the nation-state with those of a single religious group.
Such an identification is anathema to Rushdie in the Indian context. But when he, like Aurora, starts “using Arab Spain to re-imagine India” (Rushdie 227), the parallels enable a prophetic critique. As J. M. Coetzee notes in his review of the novel, they suggest “that the Arab penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenth-century Inquisition in Spain.”[13] Overlaying the context of 1492 on 1992 invokes a historical process of national “purification” through which Rushdie can mirror and satirize an event still in process in India. Medieval Spain offers the positive parallel to the older, pluralist nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru, while the ascendant Christian Spain of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance—a fractious, coercive society—forecasts the course India could take under the sway of Hindu nationalism. As in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie conveys through imagery the historical shift from a normative, inspiring national condition to a satirized, dangerous one. And again the Menippean grotesque gives way to a more “negative” satire aimed at the very social forces that threaten inclusiveness.
As before, the difference between the earlier and later national conditions is based on a discrepancy between benign interminglings (of realms, fluids, bodies, and peoples) and invasive penetrations or poisonings—in other words, between a voluntary opening up to and an unwanted assault or infection by. Here is how Moraes first describes the historical process: “What started with perfume ended with a very big stink indeed … there is a thing that bursts out of us at times, a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another” (36; original ellipsis). In this passage the nose is invoked to suggest a movement from pleasant to unpleasant bodily intake, leading immediately to a frightening image of parasitic contagion. Forces allied with “purity” are identified with the most damaging and monstrous of impurities. Even in this early foreshadowing the satiric reversal is established. The associations are made more explicit later on with references to acid in the nation’s bloodstream, to “the plague-spores of communal fanaticism” (208), and to Uma, whose enticing appearance of affirming pluralism masks a reality of self-seeking devastation: she sows “pestilential seeds” to produce a “menu” of “misery, catastrophe, grief” and division for Moraes’s family to consume (320). After the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in 1992, with fundamentalist ideologies on the rise and Bombay blowing apart, Moraes describes the national condition in a brilliant, multilayered image: “[T]he barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, each one of us full of our doom…. [T]he explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs” (372). This description is interesting not only for its transhistorical fusions of military and body imagery, but also for its insistence on the collective “we” in assigning responsibility. Even as he laments the violence of divisive forces, Moraes adheres to his vision of himself as part of the crowd.
This is appropriate, since he has indeed been part of the problem. Rushdie does not exclude his protagonist from the condition he critiques. Like his forebear Boabdil the Unlucky, whose secret alliance with the Christians helped end Moorish sovereignty in Granada,[14] Moraes spends time as an agent of the intolerant enemy. He may embody and advocate multiplicity through his ancestry, his professed beliefs, and his “metaphorical rôle” in Aurora’s paintings as “a unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism, … a symbol … of the new nation” (303), but when employed as a thug by Raman Fielding, or Mainduck, he is co-opted by the novel’s main exemplar of the new fundamentalism. Admittedly, Moraes does so after the shock of Uma’s duplicity, his ostracism from family, his imprisonment in Bombay Central Prison (“the stomach, the intestine of the city,” 287), and his rescue by Mainduck. But he does not feel torn about the betrayal that his job as bully represents. In fact, he relishes the new life: “Unhesitating, I embraced my fate…. I would become this man. I studied Fielding closely. I must say as he said, do as he did. He was the new way, the future” (295, 300). Thereafter Moraes features in his mother’s paintings only as “a semi-allegorical figure of decay”; she has “apparently decided that the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and mélange which had been … [her] notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light” (303). The inclusive, in other words, can include and then be overcome by powerful forces of exclusiveness.
What is the significance of Moraes’s complicity and Aurora’s disillusionment to the novel’s satiric strategies? Do these developments blur or undermine the idealized moral vision of the nation from which Rushdie’s critique is launched? There are two perspectives from which one might answer these questions, which get at the heart of the novel’s ideological and generic conundrums.
From the first perspective, Moraes’s years with Mainduck serve Rushdie’s satiric agenda in a conventional way. Like Saleem’s stint in the Pakistani army, they give Moraes access to the primary target so that he (and Rushdie) can really show its deformities. Up close, Mainduck can be described in all his repulsive physicality: “And in his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar’s sack, with his frog’s croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog’s lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the little beedi-rolls of money …, he was indeed a Frog King” (232). This is conventionally “negative” grotesque imagery; it is Wolfgang Kayser’s alienating satiric grotesque,[15] not Bakhtin’s optimistic one. Up close, too, we encounter Mainduck’s reactionary public policies: anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-working women, pro-sati, pro-caste. And we observe the private man, who resembles a coercive and decadent Mafia Don. Besides the grotesque, Rushdie uses many of satire’s traditional strategies of representational violence to critique fundamentalists: reductive metonymy (the BJP, RSS, and VHP as “Alphabet-soupists,” 363); analogy (Mainduck as a “little Hitler,” 297); mechanization (Tin-man Hazaré’s robotic appearance); understatement (Moraes’s eerie descriptions of beatings); and the appropriation of a satirized discourse as the narrator’s own: “Muslims and Hindus had, for a time, shared [Ayodhya] without fuss … but to the devil with such old news! Who cared about those unhealth., split hairs?” (363; original ellipsis).
Satiric horror is registered through the image of the violated body that becomes the lowest common denominator of Mainduck’s political agitation; assaulting people is the main thing Moraes and the other goondas do. As in Midnight’s Children, imposed transgressions of bodily boundaries signal “negative” satire, not the positive interminglings of the Menippean grotesque. Here blood-letting takes on additional ironic meaning when identified with Hindu nationalists: though they advocate the integrity and purity of blood as metaphor, they violate the integrity and cause impurity of blood in its literal form.
From this first perspective, Moraes’s time with Mainduck is a device to facilitate satire of fundamentalist thinking through Moraes. The fact that Moraes himself administers beatings, breaks unions, and enforces sati and caste discipline is just a convenient (and powerful) way of displaying a satirized condition in all its nauseating detail. Moraes is thus a target only insofar as he becomes a temporary synecdoche for activities and ideologies attributed to others. In this reading his primary function is as window on, not exemplar of, the religious right; he is exempt from the novel’s critique. But is he really? I would like to suggest a second, more allegorical reading, which sees Moraes’s involvement as sign of a new satiric despair in Rushdie and of a more all-embracing pessimism about India.
The gloom with which Midnight’s Children ended was based on a feeling, in the aftermath of the Emergency, that democracy and human rights had been betrayed by the prime minister and her loyalists. There was treachery at the highest level, and citizens (like Saleem and the midnight children) had been victimized. The Emergency’s most visible challenge to the secular democracy of India was to its legitimacy as a democracy. Although Rushdie has written that “it was during the Emergency that the lid flew off the Pandora’s box of communal discord,”[16] and while Indira Gandhi’s politics had always been divisive and factionalizing by comparison with Nehru’s, as long as the Congress party was dominant, some version of the secular principle remained officially in place. She may have fostered Hindu nationalist sentiments, especially from 1980 on, but Indira Gandhi continued to advocate secularism until the day she died.[17] In the 1980s and 1990s Rushdie sees Hindu nationalism (along with other ethnically and religiously based movements) gaining an increased profile and influence among India’s people. He shows the secular-pluralist ideal underlying the nation’s democracy to be taking a beating, so to speak, and even dying a painful death. Unlike the brutally top-down nature of social upheaval during the Emergency, the rise of the religious right is a function not just of charismatic leadership but of mass participation. It is both a top-down and a grassroots movement. To Rushdie it therefore represents a greater national crisis than the Emergency.
From this second perspective, then, Moraes’s complicity is very significant to the novel’s satiric orientation. He starts out, both in the novel and in Aurora’s “Moor” paintings, as an allegorical embodiment of India as pluralistic, hybrid, gentle giant. He may grow too fast and get too big, he may be deformed, but he is not a monster. In Mainduck’s service, however, he betrays his roots and his ideals. Disillusioned from the fallout of his relationship with the divisive Uma, he lets himself become an agent of the very forces that would deny him—as individual and as national principle. Moreover, Moraes takes pleasure in his new role, administering beatings with cool efficiency, relieved that he can give up his old confusing complexity for the “simplicity” and “straightforwardness” of Mainduck’s brutal program (305). His unapologetic embrace of an alien cause suggests that Moraes, the “semi-allegorical figure of decay” (303), now represents a nation increasingly detached from its origins and willing to violate its founding principle of pluralistic secularism. The satiric critique is not just of extremist leaders, but of the body politic that responds to their factionalizing message—hence the insistence on the inclusive “we”: “A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were—let me put it bluntly—clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history’s theatre on account of the lack of greater men” (352).
This sense of societal guilt is echoed numerous times by Moraes. He says, “they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt” (297); “The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought in the land at large” (376); “the barbarians were ... within our skins…. We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall” (372–73). Rushdie’s satire is at its most multidirectional in this novel. The informing principle of its critique is Aurora’s pessimistic idea that admixture and mélange can breed darkness and distortion, that inclusiveness can breed exclusiveness. Even “Bombayness” is not powerful enough to overwhelm negating energies: “the great city’s powers of dilution” (351), Moraes says, cannot weaken the “rivers of blood” (350) that run through it after Ayodhya. In this key merging of the somatic with the topographical, the whole body-river-street network of arteries and exchanges is infected and polluted. Ideologies of purity and exclusion overrun the systems that used to guarantee impurity and inclusion; such a “disease” (208) could not spread without enormous popular support. Civic nationalism framed by the land—India as territory with all its diverse groups—is undermined by an insurgent ethnic nationalism of the majority peoples—those whose “Hindu blood” prompts them to claim special entitlement over the land.
The result is that Rushdie challenges more strongly than ever the moral and generic dualities he has always invoked—of enabling Menippean multiplicity as the normative position from which violent exclusivity is satirized. If one can turn into the other—not just at the level of genre or textuality as in Midnight’s Children, but on the societal level too—the distinction becomes impossible to maintain. As “the [apparently] pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, … turned out to be the bad egg” (272), and as the mongrel Moraes, excluded from love, is co-opted by those who would reverse the principles of secular-democratic tolerance, so India as a whole is increasingly hijacked by forces that would deny it.
The novel’s all-embracing pessimism is felt at the level of genre and tone. Despite its valorizing of intermingling and impurity, The Moor’s Last Sigh is rather anemic in the spirit of joy, carnival, regeneration, and optimism that marks the Menippean grotesque. Though it covers much the same history as Midnight’s Children, it lacks the sense of celebratory hope associated with India’s and Saleem’s early years. At independence, instead of Nehru’s inspirational “tryst with destiny” speech, we hear Vasco Miranda drunkenly prophesying the triumph of Hindu gods over Nehru’s secular-socialist ideals: “Minority-group members. Square-peg freaks. You don’t belong here” (166; original emphasis). Where Saleem as allegorical baby is pampered and loved and celebrated, Moraes’s babyhood is erased from the narrative, which leaps immediately to a childhood characterized by a divided family, insufficient love, and by his isolation as a perceived misfit. In this novel division and negativity seem to be pervasive; the seeds of ruin, however dormant, are often shown to have been planted all along. As with the needle buried in Vasco Miranda’s circulatory system—the timebomb that will eventually and without warning kill him—we are encouraged to see, within every enabling system and process, an alien but intrinsic “thing” (36) that will violently destroy it.
This gloomy fatalism is reflected structurally; the ending is contained in the beginning. Where Midnight’s Children begins with an announcement of birth and ends with a prophecy of death, The Moor’s Last Sigh is framed by the same moment of exile, despair, and premature death. The shadow of loss and exclusion—from normality, community, from life itself—hangs over the whole book. Perhaps that is not surprising. While writing the novel Rushdie was alienated from his national communities by the fatwa, which itself imposed a state of paradoxical inclusion and exclusion: “yes, you are one of us,” it said, and then: “but we reject you.”
While The Moor’s Last Sigh may display the fertile storytelling and polyphonic voice that have become Rushdie’s signature, it nonetheless seems dominated by a weary satiric detachment and resignation. Though he still waves the flag of the secular, heterogeneous India, Rushdie knows before he starts that it is faded and tattered. That vision, like the Congress party that once advocated it, is wasting away. In the new India, principles of exclusion are gaining more inclusive acceptance; the heterogeneous crowd is embracing those who would divide it. As the nation is infected, so is Rushdie’s novel. However predictably it may espouse a Menippean grotesque, the “negative” satirist’s dismay wins out.
NOTES
[1]
Josna E. Rege, “Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s
Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties,” Studies in the Novel 29.3 (Fall 1997):
349.
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[2]
Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial
Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of
Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996) 169, 174.
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[3]
Paul A. Cantor, “Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use of Spanish History in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” Studies in the Novel 29.3 (Fall 1997):
325.
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[4]
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981;
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) 301. All subsequent references are to this
edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation MC.
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[5]
Hillel Halkin, “Salman Rushdie Surrenders,” Commentary
102 (July 1996): 58.
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[6]
For discussions of Shame’s exclusive
satire, see James Harrison, Salman
Rushdie (New York: Twayne, 1992) 5, 18–24, 70; and Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures
(London: Verso, 1992) 123–58.
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[7]
Among those who have theorized satire as referential attack are Edward
Rosenheim, Charles Knight, George Test, and Northrop Frye.
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[8]
For Bakhtin’s theories of Menippean satire, see Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 112–22. For his theories of
the grotesque, see Rabelais and His World,
trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 303–436.
For a fuller discussion of the theoretical combination, and of the reading of Midnight’s Children in the following
paragraph, see my article, “Pessoptimism: Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” English Studies in Canada 24.1 (March
1998): 61–81.
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[9]
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
(Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 351. All subsequent references are to this
edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
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[10]
Cf. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of
Stories (London: Granta, 1990).
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[11]
For a good reading of Rushdie as a magic realist, and of The Moor’s Last Sigh as a pessimistic parody of Midnight’s Children, see Laura Moss,
“‘Forget those damnfool realists!’: Salman Rushdie’s Self-Parody as the Magic
Realist’s ‘Last Sigh,’” ARIEL 29.4
(October 1998): 121–39.
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[12]
Jan Read, The Moors in Spain and Portugal
(London: Faber & Faber, 1974) 202–207.
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[13]
J. M. Coetzee, “Palimpsest Regained,” review of The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie, The New York Review of Books, 21 March 1996: 14.
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[14]
L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain 1250–1500
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 301.
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[15]
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and
Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (1963; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith,
1968) 186–87.
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[16]
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands:
Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991) 3. See also 41–52.
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[17]
Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal
and Political Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989) 18, 229–31.
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