Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works (review)

If the status of Salman Rushdie's fiction is still in doubt—and for all his post-fatwa fame and the fact that Midnight's Children won the Booker of Bookers in 1993, there are still many critics who share Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra's opinion that it is but "a marvel of clotted sententiousness . . . an alarming new kind of anti-literature"—few would deny the eloquence and force of Rushdie's non-fiction writing. ¹

His essays and reviews, many of them collected in Imaginary Homelands and Step Across the Line, are more often than not sharp-toothed but illuminating polemics on topics as various as the failure of black film-makers to tell populist stories, the Raj revival of the early 1980s, and the relationship between politics and the novel. They try—succinctly and with the fevered intensity that deadline-driven journalism induces—to grapple with metamorphosis, cultural hybridity and many of those themes enumerated in The Satanic Verses: "broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home." ²

Given this rich archive of self-scrutiny and auto-critique, scholars who choose to write on Rushdie are faced with a particular challenge: namely, that Rushdie has almost certainly tackled or theorized the same issues they are now raising. And very likely with more verve and wit than those required to follow the tortured syntactical structures of academic English. So when Sabrina Hassumani argues that there is a relationship between migrancy and postmodernism, it's hard not to feel that the subject was—eloquently—exhausted some years back when Rushdie, asked by an interviewer about the impact of modernism and postmodernism on his writing, replied:

If you arrive in a society as a migrant, your position is automatically a dislocated one, and so you have to work out a literary mode which can allow that kind of conflict of descriptions to take place in it. . . I do feel that physical and geographical displacement makes you self-conscious about your position. ³

In fact, Hassumani doesn't explore at all deeply the biographical factors that shaped Rushdie's writing, nor indeed the extent to which it was a response to the displacements wrought on British society—and on the immigrants themselves— by post-war Commonwealth migration to the United Kingdom. Her aim, rather, is to focus "on the manner in which Rushdie is informed by poststructuralist and postmodern theory." This allows her, she says, to "address the issues of representation that Rushdie raises very effectively in his major political novels, it also facilitates my discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel" (13).

It's an honorable enough goal. Unfortunately Hassumani fails to tell us whether or not Rushdie has actually read any postmodern or post-structuralist theory. Nor does she ever really talk much about what the modern novel might be, either before or after he has pushed its boundaries. How odd, for what's interesting about Rushdie is the extent to which his work, while commonly trumpeted for its radical newness, actually owes a huge stylistic and formal debt (one that Rushdie himself has on occasion acknowledged) to an older, pre-modern tradition of writing, both European (Cervantes, Robert Burton, Sterne) and non-European (1001 Nights, Rumi's Conference of the Birds).

Hassumani's apparent lack of interest in fiction or in textuality itself means that she's not in a position to consider Rushdie in relation to such radical twentieth-century Indian writers as G. V. Desani, of whose first and only novel he has argued, "H. Haterr is the first post-modernist Indian novel if you like. It's much more self-conscious and reflexive than Midnight's Children." ⁴ Desani's language, a ludic and ludicrous mish-mash of...