52 Carmen Bujdei

Narratives of ‘Liquid Modernity’: Translation, Migrancy and Nomadism in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

placed himself in the direct lineage of the For Salman Rushdie, an Indian- mohajirs, any endeavour to fix his identity born British writer of Muslim extraction in single, static categorial slots amounts to currently living in America, it seems only enfreakment. Consequently, by deploying natural that his ongoing fictional project tropes of identity that point to some should have targeted questions of self- irreducible organic substratum while at the definition and self-location (in its various same time suggesting its necessary cultural avatars: dis-location, mis-location, re- mutations under the aegis of travel, Rushdie location). As he confesses, his works record commits himself to querying solid, mono- ‘an attempt to come to terms with the lithic notions of individual (as well as various component parts of myself – communal) identity, and adopts translation, countries, memories, histories, families, migrancy, and nomadism as the fluid, gods.’1 It therefore comes as little surprise molecular alternatives to inclusion in molar, that externally-imposed labels such as massifying structures (Deleuze & Guattari, ‘commonwealth’ literature should be 283). Instead of rootedness, ‘cultural trans- rejected as chimerical. A chimera is, after plantation,’ rather than procreation, ‘cross- all, to cite the modern usage of the term pollination,’ and in lieu of clear genea- from the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a logical traces, a ‘polyglot family tree,’ mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.’ where direct ancestry is repudiated in favour A phantasm divorced from reality, an of one’s freely choosing, in rhizomatic lines ‘unreal monstrous creature of the ima- of fugue that traverse the east-west divide, gination’ (Rushdie, Imaginary 63) or, to one’s literary forebears, whether they be retrieve its classical definitions from Swift, Conrad, Tagore, or Ram Mohan Roy Homer’s Iliad or Hesiod’s Theogony, a (Rushdie, Imaginary 20-21). Given his fabulous fire-breathing monster admixing in liminal position within the hyphenated its composite body feline, capric and space2 straddling such diverse cultures, serpentine features. Rushdie’s work is ambivalently poised Wherefore this phantom, beastly between both the western and the eastern category, reminiscent of the chthonian, literary traditions, and resorts to what Caren chaotic antagonists of Olympian deities Kaplan calls ‘mythologised narrativisations (Leeming 104)? Notwithstanding its impro- of displacement’ as practices of cultural bability or incongruity, the chimera analogy (self-) identification (2). signals that for a writer who has insistently To this effect, particularly in later narratives such as The Ground Beneath Her fact, one major transfor- 53 Feet (1999), Fury (2001) and Shalimar the mation that distinguishes Clown (2005), Rushdie seems to confirm, as ‘light’ or ‘liquefied’ mo- well as amend to some extent, Zygmunt dernity from its ‘heavy’ or ‘solid’ counter- Bauman’s diagnosis of the progressive part is the breakdown, erosion or melting liquefaction of the age of modernity, away of frontiers. Territorial borderlines whereby solid, rigid, traditional societal and and their function of dividing, separating, power structures are being supplanted, in containing and reinforcing systemic order this ‘post-panoptical’ stage, by more fluid lose both consistency and relevance faced and flexible, extra-territorial figurations. In with spontaneous flows along network-like Bauman’s account of globalised postmo- capillaries (25). Boundaries or, rather, their dernity, contrasted with the solids’ static- permeability in-forms Rushdie’s liminal ness, fixity and spatial containment, the figurations of identity as interconnecting fluids’ mobile and transient occupation of native and foreign, self and other, margin space renders them amenable to comparison and centre, east and west: as he confesses, with travel: ‘I’ve been crossing frontiers all my life – physical, social, intellectual, artistic border- “Fluids travel easily. They ‘flow’, ‘spill’, lines’ (‘The Ground Beneath My Feet’ 42). ‘run out’, ‘splash’, ‘pour over’, ‘leak’, Travel, which for cultural anthropologist ‘flood’, ‘spray’, ‘drip’, ‘seep’, ‘ooze’; James Clifford involves a ‘range of unlike solids, they are not easily stopped practices for situating the self in [a] space’ – they pass around some obstacles, and ‘a figure for different modes of dissolve some others and bore or soak dwelling and displacement’ (1989), is first their way through others still meeting and foremost rendered in Rushdie’s works with solids they emerge unscathed, while as ‘translation,’ understood in its dual sense the solids they have met, if they stay as both transference across spatial frontiers solid, are changed – get moist or and conveyance from one language or drenched. The extraordinary mobility of culture into another. The geographical and fluids is what associates them with the linguistic meanings of ‘translation’ merge in idea of ‘lightness’” (Bauman 2). the following quasi-identical definitions extracted from Rushdie’s non-fictional and Neither fixed by space nor fictional prose, which strike a similar note bounded by time, liquids offer Bauman a with George Steiner’s reference to the potent metaphor for characterising post- ‘extraterritorial,’ homeless, unhoused poets modernity, ‘second modernity’ or ‘surmo- of the twentieth century, who are ‘wan- dernity’ as an age which no longer endorses derers across language’3: the supremacy of sedentarism over noma- dism, settlement over free-flowing traffic, or “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymo- location over migration. Instead, with the logically, from the Latin for ‘bearing advent of electronically propagated infor- across’. Having been borne across the mation, which has condensed time to world, we are translated men. It is nor- instantaneity and has volatilised spatial mally supposed that something always distance, “the difference between ‘close by’ gets lost in translation; I cling, obsti- and ‘far away’ or for that matter between nately, to the notion that something can the wilderness and the civilized, orderly also be gained” (Rushdie, Imaginary space, has been all but cancelled” (11). In 17).

54 ‘I, too, am a translated cultures; at other times, that we fall man. I have been borne between two stools’ (Rushdie, Imaginary across. It is generally 15). believed that something is always lost in What is to be gained from existing translation; I cling to the notion […] that in translation, if dislodgment is a common something can also be gained’ (Rushdie, human predicament (‘the past is a country Shame 29). from which we have all emigrated’), expe- rienced all the more intensely by a writer Both statements occur in the literally dis-placed into the ‘elsewhere’ context of attempting to situate Asian implicit in ‘out-of-country’ and ‘out-of- writers in Western culture – itself, as language’ (12)? The answer Rushdie pro- Edward Said remarks in Reflections on vides highlights memory as the archae- Exile, ‘in large part the work of exiles, ological tool for provisionally recon- émigrés, refugees’ (173). Yet exile, in stru(ct)ing the past from the ‘broken pots of Said’s vision, is a ‘condition of terminal antiquity’ into imaginative at-homeness: loss’; it is predicated as one’s pathological dis-engagement from one’s place of origins, “our physical alienation from India as out-of-placeness. Estrangement, the almost inevitably means that we will not ’unhealable rift forced between a human be capable of reclaiming precisely the being and a native place, between the self thing that was lost; that we will, in short, and its true home’ (173) signals a loss of create fictions, not actual cities or integrity, a fall from some prelapsarian villages, but invisible ones, imaginary wholeness or Antaean oneness with the homelands, Indias of the mind’” (10). ground beneath one’s feet, which fractures into unbridgeable chasms between home The plural implicit in the previous and away. Rushdie does underscore Said’s statement signals a refusal to succumb to a definition of exile as a postlapsarian ‘dis- ghetto mentality, which would circumvent continuous state of being’; nevertheless, he the ‘homeland’ within constricting cultural also supplements the exiles’ contrapuntal boundaries, turning physical dislocation into ‘plurality of vision’ (Said 186) by claiming a ‘form of internal exile’ (17). As Said also that given the migrants’ condition of suggests, too strict an enclosure within the simultaneous belonging/not-belonging, geo- borders of ‘familiar territory’ might easily graphical distance implodes and simply veer into a carceral experience: the exiles’ serves to grant them ‘stereoscopic’ aware- defining experience is that of crossing ness, a dialogic rather than monologic pers- barriers ‘of thought and experience’ (185). pective upon a past that corresponds to a Novels like Midnight’s Children lost home and a present that encompasses (1981) and Shame (1983) revolve around foreignness : the articulation of ‘imaginary homelands.’ In contrast with the alleged solidity of the ‘We are Hindus who have crossed the myths legitimating the birth of post- black water; we are Muslims who eat Independence India or of seceded Pakistan, pork. And as a result – as my use of the these narratives appear to promote the Christian notion of the Fall indicates – notion that in order for these countries to be we are now partly of the West. Our taking stock, they have to be fluidly identity is at once plural and partial. projected into ‘hundreds of millions of Sometimes we feel that we straddle two possible versions’ (Imaginary 10). Against a historical canvas of intensive re-codification ploration. In this novel, 55 of ethnic, religious and national frontiers, Omar Khayyam Shakil is a anti-heroic questers like Saleem Sinai and ‘peripheral man,’ a Omar Khayyam Shakil (only nominally ‘creature of the edge’ (24) who grows up in related to the Persian poet) feel uncom- captivity, trapped inside a labyrinthine fortably anchored in the margins. Saleem – mansion that hovers above the ‘hell hole’ of whose facial topography uncannily repli- a dumbbell-shaped, border town, polarised cates the geographical contours of his now, in the fourteenth century of the country and whose birth on the cusp of Hegiran calendar, not only between the India’s liberation triggers his lamentations extreme emotions of honour and shame, but of being ‘handcuffed’ or ‘chained’ to his also between the older, indigenous bazaar country’s history – is confined in a pickling and the more recent district of the ‘alien,’ or factory. From this position of invisibility, he British sahibs (11-12). The carceral is clamouring, nevertheless, a grandiose role discipline enforced upon him by his three- of both chronicler and heroic founder of the some maternal custodians hyperbolically nation. Fraught with deliberate or fortuitous inflates his sense of marginality, of ‘living inconsistencies, his project of writing an at the edge of the world, so close that he epic of the nation4 derails, in Shandean or might fall off at any moment’ (21). Sheherazadian manner, into a ‘chutnifi- Designed to thwart any outburst of shame, cation of history’ (Midnight’s 459). In Omar’s entombment/enwombment in this effect, his is just another alternative, petit tightly-sealed closed system – which, histoire, through which he contests sooner or later, is bound to lose its labile monolithic, hegemonic narratives about a equilibrium and liquefy into a ‘sweltering, homeland ‘which would never exist except entropical zone’ (30) – emphasises the by the efforts of a phenomenal collective cumbersome ‘heaviness’ of any (territorial) will – except in a dream we all agreed to confinement. Examples here abound: the dream’ (112). As Su maintains (558), the zenana, the triune mothers’ self- magical gift boasted by Saleem, that of inter(n)ment in the ‘unmanageably infinite becoming the All-India Radio and con- mansion’ of Nishapur (14), Shakil’s vertigo vening inside his head the Conference of the about the great nothingness lying beyond 1001 Children of Midnight, attests to, on the the Impossible Mountains, Rani Harappa’s one hand, his desire to transcend spatial stranding in the ‘backyard of the universe’ limitations through the establishment of a (94) or Sufyia Zinobia’s virtual imprison- virtual, globalised network of like-minds, ment in her family’s Takallouf, the ‘untrans- and on the other hand, to his falling prey to latable,’ ‘opaque,’ ‘tongue-tying’ shame the very totalising impulses that have (104). rendered India ‘insufficiently imagined’ Several possibilities emerge as a (Imaginary 387). result of such forced insulation. Under the The marginal topos of the frontier gravitational pressure of motion restrictions, – understood either as ‘contact zone’ of the curvature of spacetime turns Shakil’s transculturation (Pratt 6-7) or as disjunctive border universe into a ‘hideously indeter- breach of space – is also explored in Shame, minate,’ heterotopian maze haunted by the in which the trope of cloistering (with its ‘minotaur of forbidden light’ (30-32), a corollaries of self-willed and induced ‘tropological world,’ in Brian McHale’s incarceration) ambivalently offers protect- terms (Postmodernist 141), where his tion and alternative means of spatial ex- identity oscillates among a plurality of

56 grossly distended gothic to the peripheries by ‘conventions of dis- frames of reference. belief’ (199) and cancels, through her Shakil’s vandalism of the savage ransacking of walled-in citadels, the ghost-infested mansion (his ‘massacre’ of resistance of space and time alike. the place’s history) conveys him in the Enforced migrancy, on the other direct lineage of the European wild man and hand, tends to engender the longing for the barbarian ‘noble savage,’ restricted as he immobility, for rootedness. The massive is to the compensatory, surrogate freedom population migrations, triggered by the of a feral child, rampaging wildly about like collective fantasy of constructing Pakistan a ‘time-traveller’ bereft of his magic as the Land of the Pure mean, for Saleem capsule. The iridescent or opalescent effect Sinai, abandoning his native Bombay and (McHale, Postmodernist 39) is further implanting his umbilical cord in Karachi: a amplified by Shakil’s insertion in the failed project since the pursuit of the new vampiric, transworld genealogy of either promised land only leads the ‘dispossessed ‘caped crusader or cloaked bloodsucker,’ multitudes’ to erect real or imaginary Batman or Dracula (Shame 22). What barriers aimed to enforce a sense of at- Rushdie foregrounds through Shakil’s homeness into unfamiliar territory (such is monstrously outgrown ontological plurality the case of Jamila Singer’s adoption of is the unresolved dialectics between the purdah and becoming the star icon of her twin fantasies of roots and routes, between new nation). For Saleem Sinai, however, enracined allegiances to the mother-country this entails a relapse into carceral and the compulsion for trans-border flight, confinement: his sole means of resisting for self-deracination. Himself a respectable massification attempts and retrieving his physician concealing his beastly double native Bombay is by being teleported or within (albeit zombified through his fleeing without permit or passport, in severing all ties with the rooting emotion of magical realist fashion, aboard Parvati-the- shame)5, Omar Khayyam Shakil confirms Witch’s wicker basket along ‘the air-lanes Stevenson’s prophecy that ‘man will be of the subcontinent’ (Midnight’s 381). ultimately known for a mere polity of One of the most relevant passages multifarious, incongruous and independent regarding cross-cultural translation occurs denizens’ (Stevenson 61). As a counterpart in Shame, a ‘novel of leavetaking’ (28), to Omar’s shamelessness, Sufyia Zinobia albeit one in which the exile or the émigré Ryder furthers the Jekyll-Hyde antinomy to narrator remains sutured by invisible, elastic its outermost extremes and becomes shame straps extending across geographical and incarnate, literalising the fairy-tale motif of imaginary frontiers to an interstitial space the beast erupting within the beauty, of the that conflates, ‘at a slight angle,’ a real and ‘bacilli of humiliation’ (141) unleashing a a fictional country (29). Variously con- violent inner metamorphosis into ‘a structed as a homeland whose name was chimera, the collective fantasy of a stifled born in exile, since it was acronymically people, a dream born of their rage’ (263). coined by Muslim immigrants to the Sufyia’s immurement within the collective metropolitan core (87), or as Peccavistan, in phantasm of shame triggers her immuno- the apocryphal narrative recounting the logical cataclysm and fosters her corporeal nineteenth-century British governor’s pur- transformation into a roaming panther with ported confession on conquering the a basilisk stare and a pale skin betraying her province of Sind (Peccavi, ‘I have sinned’), mohajir descent, which refuses consignment Pakistan represents a palimpsest country, superposing the flaking layers of found- hybrid) and his mobile 57 ational myths. Transcending boundaries, spanning across linguistic breaking through the weight of such myths and cultural frontiers. defines the condition of migrants or In the light of Caroline Walker mohajirs: implicit in their gesture of flight, Bynum’s distinctions between hybridity and ‘which all men anciently dream, the thing metamorphosis as representational and rhe- for which they envy the birds’ (85), is their torical gateways to fundamentally different eschewal of the eschatological cones- notions of selfhood (29), Rushdie’s t(r)opo- quences, pictured here in terms of the Norse logical use of translation as a metaphor and Yggdrasil approaching ignic consummation a space of fluid location foregrounds his (88), of upholding the phantasm of roots. If quest for a processual, dynamic mapping of gravity and belonging constitute conser- identity. As Walker Bynum explains, vative, hegemonic narratives designed to hybridity congeals mutability, while meta- arrest movement and enmesh people firmly morphosis endorses process. Hybrids pre- in their birthplaces, their counter narratives, clude ideas of transformation, making anti-gravity and non-belonging trans-late visible the co-existence or ‘simultaneity of Rushdie’s migrants (‘borne-across humans,’ two-ness’; in contrast, the two-ness implicit Imaginary 278) into the nomadic conscious- in metamorphosis unfolds temporally – in ness that defies ‘homologation into domi- narrative or, one might say, peripatetic nant ways of representing the self’ (Brai- fashion – between a pole of departure and a dotti 25). pole of arrival, between a ‘one-ness’ that is While inevitably fraught with left behind and a one-ness that is distortions and slippages, trans-lating, approached (rather than attained): ferrying across language boundaries then defines Rushdie’s liquid location in between ‘Hybrid reveals a world of difference, a the eclecticism of his Indian heritage and world that is and is multiple; meta- the transnational, cross-lingual space of morphosis reveals a world of stories, of English (or, rather, Hinglish), which, due to things under way. Metamorphosis mutual pollination with the colonised breaks down categories by breaching languages of the Asian subcontinent, also them; hybrid forces contradictory or lends itself to further ‘remaking’ by Indian incompatible categories to coexist and writers who are now ‘carving new territories serve as commentary each on the other’ for themselves within its frontiers’ (Ima- (31). ginary 69, 64). Whether it be through the Angrezi in which he is compelled to write Nowhere does Rushdie outline the (Shame 38), or Hug-me, the Bombayite routes of passage from one hybrid site to ‘garbage argot’ freely switching between another, and address the perils inherent in Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English arresting such lines of flight into the fixity in the course of a single sentence (Ground of ‘entity-ness’ (Walker-Bynum 31), more 5), Rushdie’s rejection of embeddedness in vividly than in The Ground Beneath Her ethnocentric, monolithic cultural spaces Feet (1999). The novel carries a step further rigidly structured around a ‘fantasy of the ‘conflict between the fantasy of Home purity’ (Imaginary 68) and his forging of a and the fantasy of Away’ (Ground 55) and malleable rhetorical melange may also features ex-centric travellers who render explain his reluctance to accept the chimera Europe and America into what James of a ‘commonwealth’ identity (a static Clifford calls ‘sites of travel,’ which are

58 being ‘traversed from the to become one, destroying each other in the outside,’ to the effect of effort’ (401). While the possibility that ‘enacting differently Rushdie’s diagnosis of a historical crisis centred worlds’ (Clifford, ‘Travelling’ 103 currently engulfing the world may be & passim). Travel, charting passageways hinting at Velikovsky’s highly contro- between east and west in terms of aerial versial, catastrophic outlook on celestial translations across real and invisible fault- mechanics cannot be ruled out, and while lines, unsettles the horizontal-vertical and his dystopian forecast, amplified in Fury the margin-centre dyads. Whereas the and enacted in Shalimar the Clown, boundaries of homelands vacillate between envisages the ‘colliding thought-worlds’ of fluidity and fixity and apparently vanish in Western liberalism and Eastern funda- the endless global territorial reconfi- mentalism (Booth & Dunne 1), it seems gurations, subjected as they are to endless more likely that the ‘close encounters’ processes of partitioning and secession that (McHale, Postmodernist 60) between afflict the Indian subcontinent, different worlds (eastern and western, celestial and infernal, ‘real’ and imaginary) ‘[e]verything starts shifting, changing, staged in The Ground Beneath Her Feet getting partitioned, separated by fron- foregrounds the fluidisation of their tiers, splitting, re-splitting, coming apart. boundaries into heterotopian zones that Centrifugal forces begin to pull harder allow for a shattering of rigid, totalised, than their centripetal opposites. Gravity unified formations of subject identity. dies. People fly off into space’ (168), Instead, conveyance across ‘contact zones’ – what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the for Ormus Cama, Umeed Merchant and space hosting an ongoing process of Vina Apsara, westernised mohajirs or intertwining and overlapping between eastern hipsters ‘on the road,’ the imaginary ‘mutually differentiative cultural and chasms dividing orient from occident are historical backgrounds’ (6) – weakens the traumatically experienced at the level of ontological consistence of solipsistic worlds flesh. It is not gratuitous that Rushdie and strips bare the process of identity should have outlined corporeal travel by construction.6 reference to biological processes implicit in Transportation across the rift cross-culturation: exiting Bombay/Wombay gaping wide between worlds and under- is a birth process, skin shedding is a sign of worlds or otherworlds engenders somatic rebirth and renewal, developing phantom modifications variously charted as mole- limbs is like forming new allegiances to the cular mutations or grotesque transfor- country of adoption, viral infections – see mations (see for instance, in The Satanic Vina’s coming down with Wisdom-of-the- Verses, Saladdin Chamcha’s metamorphosis East-itis, or gurushitia – all boil down to a into a horned, hoofed goat-man hybrid). (facetious) ‘scientific’ approach to culture, Invariably described as an aerial passage, defined as follows: ‘[a] group of micro- travel occasions the crossing of an organisms grown in a nutrient substance insubstantial frontier, the piercing through under controlled conditions’ (97). of an epidermal layer that functions simul- The point of transition across taneously – to use the figurations in Steven cultures fosters these travellers’ simulta- Connor’s cultural history of skin – as a neous exposure to ‘worlds in collision,’ screen (a translucent sheath warranting the ‘universes tearing into each other, striving integrity of the worlds it contains), as a membrane (a porous, permeable surface transience, uncertainty, 59 enabling the exchange between inside and change, have erected a outside) and as a milieu or ‘a place of powerful system of minglings, a mingling of places’ (26). stigmas and taboos […] so that we In Midnight’s Children, it is mostly conform, we pretend to be Bombay that represents such a contact zone motivated by loyalties and solidarities we or ‘global integral’ of melding cultures and do not really feel, we hide our secret identities, but in The Ground Beneath Her identities beneath the false skins of those Feet this threshold is crossed in mid-air: identities which bear the belongers’ seal Ormus Cama, ‘musical sorcerer,’ ‘golden of approval. But the truth leaks out in our troubadour,’ ‘the age’s unholy fool,’ dreams; alone in our beds […], we soar, claiming to be the ‘secret originator, the we fly, we flee. And in the waking prime innovator of music, the secret dreams our societies permit, in our language of all humanity, our common myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate heritage, whatever mother tongue we speak’ the non-belongers, the different ones, the (91), begins his katabatic descent in search outlaws, the freaks’ (74). for his Eurydice at the exact point of thrusting through a translucid celestial Even after his presumptuous re- membrane, ‘an ectoplasmic barrier,’ ghostly discovery of America (‘We are the Pilgrim guards patrolling it and all (260). Flying Children, Ormus thinks. Where the first foot over Bosphorus, Ormus enters this ‘transit falls, let it be Bombay Rock,’ 258), Ormus zone,’ which expands into a protracted da Cama, qua Orpheus qua Morpheus qua liminal phase in his rite of passage and Metamorpheus, remains enthralled in this determines a ‘biochemical quiver,’ a transitional phase. On board the ‘May- mutation ‘at the level of the cell, of the flower,’ his shape-shifting metamorphosis is gene, of the particle’ (260), to the effect that not tarnished with any anxieties of identity from ‘flesh devotee’ he becomes a ‘preacher loss; on the contrary, it involves his retrieval of the spirit,’ unsettling the flimsy distinc- of ‘westernness’ as a natural legacy of his tion between western hedonism and eastern Bombay background. Ormus (whose radi- asceticism. What Ormus actually achieves is cally composite selves encompass refe- overcoming repressive, structured, hierar- rences to not only Orpheus, but also to chical forms of identity and embarking on a Hormuz, Vasco da Gama and Gayomart, his ‘nomadic politics’ (Braidotti 35) of trans- still-born, non-identical, dizygotic twin) gressing, trespassing, breaking through experiences dis-orientation, loss of geogra- molar aggregates. This movement towards phical bearings, and entry into a hete- forming new alliances, along lines that are rotopian zone in which historical facts get horizontal, dispersive rather than vertical, entangled with fictional constructs to the integrative, is reminiscent of Deleuze and point that they become indistinguishable. Guattari’s notion of ‘molecular becoming’ ‘Spaces of alternate ordering,’ spaces of (283). In Rushdie’s narrative this is trans- deferred transition across gaps that ‘can lated as Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s ‘fourth never be closed up’ (Hetherington viii-ix), function of outsideness’ or as the disruptive heterotopias allow for the ‘unreal’ to take drive of rootlessness or nomadism, against precedence over and even prompt which manifestations of the ‘real.’ In mid-flight, the gash in the sky-membrane becomes a ‘those who value stability, who fear junction point, a node at which forking

60 paths collude, creating to the other quiddity now have blurry scope for an ‘ontological edges. […] The frontiers are softening. parallax’ (McHale, Con- The time may not be far off when they structing 54). Examples of this include, to disappear entirely. This notion, which use McHale’s comprehensive survey of the ought to excite him, instead fills him landscapes of postmodernist fiction (1987), with terrible dread. If the forking paths Chinese-box worlds (the slashes in the are coming together, if a point of screen of Ormus’s in-flight movie revealing confluence is ahead, […] if such a another movie and so on); intertextual zones decompartmentalisation were to occur, hypothesising about the interference of and all verities suddenly failed, could we characters from other fictional worlds survive the force of the event?’ (400) (Tolkien’s demoniacal Sauron causing Vina Apsara’s descent into the Underworld); or One answer – supplied, obviously, worlds under erasure, the most memorable in the context of the America’s counter- example regarding the crossing of the culture and its Dionysian excesses – is ultimate frontier – the frontier of the skin: protean metamorphosis. The earthquake ‘At the frontier of the skin no dogs patrol,’ songs that Ormus Cama dedicates to the which is instantaneously invalidated by ‘At advent of chaos and anarchic mutability the frontier of the skin mad dogs patrol’ trigger the audiences’ bestial transfor- (55). mations and their bohemian, centrifugal Ormus’s ventures into alternative errantry as the sole alternatives to hyper- universes witness the melting of everything institutionalised forms of the oppressive that is ‘rock-hard’ into thin air (361), the civilisation and their drive towards off-centring of the world’s axes, which dehumanisation. causes frontiers to glide across territories Ormus’s horrific blueprint of a and abysmal gaps to fracture the solid ‘millenarian eschatology’ (296) is still ground beneath one’s feet. Not only does pending to unveil the ‘unsolidity of solid his route through the looking glass provide ground’ (55) in Rushdie’s two latest novels. him access to parallel worlds in which Fury (2001) and, more recently, Shalimar England is ‘ersatz’ America, Kennedy the Clown (2005) document the dis- escapes assassination attempts in Dallas and orientation experienced by nomadic selves the Watergate Affair is a mere fantasy in the metropolitan sprawls of America. In thriller, but the extreme fluidisation of his particular, although acknowledging a post- ‘double vision,’ which triggers an excessive historical stage of Western society, by permeability of transworld frontiers, brings outlining America as the ‘Promised Land’ about apocalyptic visions of the earth of liberal democracy (Fukuyama ix), these imploding in a world-encompassing mega- novels nonetheless undermine the notion of quake: modernity’s blueprint utopia come true by, on the one hand, performing a Bau- ‘The barriers between the world of drillardian critique of hyperreality,7 and on dreams and the waking world, between the other, highlighting the resurgence of the spheres of the actual and the universalising narratives such as natio- imagines, are breaking down. There is a nalism, religious fundamentalism and global progression. Something is changing. campaigns against terror. England in the Instead of the gashes through which he 1960s no longer represented the ‘dream- formerly saw these visions, the windows country’ that might centripetally lure these self-outcasts, but a society that expectorated ‘Give me a name, 61 outsiders (for instance, Sir Darius Xerxes America/…/ Bathe me Cama), or ghettoised them in contemporary in amnesia and clothe replicas of panoptical structures, reducing me in your powerful unknowing./…/ No them to the condition of ‘immigrunting,’ longer a historian but a man without ‘immigratitude’ and ‘immigrovelling.’ histories let me be. I’ll rip my lying America, on the other hand, the ‘Great mother tongue out of my throat and Attractor’ (The Ground 102), the space of speak your broken English instead. Scan non-belonging, as well as of voracious me, digitise me, beam me up. If the past consumerism by definition, magnetically is the sick old Earth, then, America, be attracts and devours them: my flying saucer. Fly me to the rim of space. The moon’s not far enough’ (51). ‘I want to be in America, America where everyone’s like me, because everyone If non-belonging, nomadism is comes from somewhere else. […] all that celebrated in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, yearning, hope, greed, excess, the whole Fury and Shalimar the Clown represent lot adding up to a fabulous noisy narratives of return, of reversing the routes historyless self-inventing citizenry of of previous voyages, eastwards, in an jumbles and confusions; all those attempt to recover the lost contours of variform manglings of English adding up homelands which have to be imaginatively to the livingest English in the world’ retrieved into existence. Homebound (258-259). voyages in Midnight’s Children could still be fraught with the migrants’ acquisition of Whereas England in these an ‘altered vision’ upon their no longer narratives increasingly lends itself to Lévi- recognisable native lands. The European Strauss’s distinction in Tristes Tropiques8 sojourn of Saleem Sinai’s grandfather, between the anthropoemic strategies of Aadam Aziz, in the first decades of modern societies, which either eject or twentieth century, predictably bestowed isolate polluting individuals from the social upon him the imperative of translating the body and the anthropophagic strategies of western project of emancipation and primitive societies, which absorb, swallow progress to Kashmir: up or cannibalise upon strangers (389-390), America and its consumption practices more ‘Now, returning, he saw through neatly fall into the latter category. Ame- travelled eyes. Instead of the beauty of rica’s omnivorous appetite, her tremendous the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he devouring urges (Fury 69) becomes the noticed the narrowness, the proximity of perfect place for the reinvention of the self, the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home particularly for Professor Solanka, who has and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt come to the promised land out of the – inexplicably – as though the old place professed desire to obliterate his roots, to resented his educated, stethoscoped erase, in computer fashion, the virtual return’ (11). reality of his ‘back-story’, to discard his ‘useless baggage of blood and tribe’ and For Professor Solanka, ex-Cam- initiate the process of ‘automorphosis’ or re- bridge academic, and Noman Noman, alias programming of the self: Shalimar the Clown, actor turned terrorist, however, abandoning their homelands was

62 dictated by personal, rather (Baudrillard Simulacra 23), as America has than historical traumas, in become the new centreweight in the global the first place: parental village, the ‘quicksand metropolis’ with ‘no abuse, in the case of the former, and mysteries, no depths, only surfaces and dishonoured manhood, in the case of the revelations’ (Shalimar 5). latter (Rushdie, ‘Inside’). The point of Despite his disenchantment with departure is this time, America itself, as America’s terminal crisis and its ‘mecha- both novels go further towards exploring nisation of the human’ (182), the dolls what Bauman calls a post-Panoptical Solanka is devoted to creating and en- society. In contrast with Bentham’s Panop- dowing with their own history (his cy- ticon, considered by Foucault to epitomize borgian Frankendolls) reach such tre- the model of modern power, Bauman mendous rates of popularity that he is maintains, post-Panoptical strategies of unawares caught in a virtual reality project, power no longer depend on fixing or immo- PlanetGalileo.com, an alterial multidi- bilising the inmates in space; on the mensional universe of the Puppet Kings, a contrary, what is at stake nowadays is not realm of computer-generated simulacra. spatial confinement but spatial fluidisation, These proliferate into a multimedia beast, not the erection of boundaries but their capable of constant metamorphosis, as demolition so as to allow the flow of Solanka admits, through the looting of increasingly mobile global powers: ancient mythical narratives. In Shalimar the Clown, migration, forced exodus for the ‘For power to be free to flow, the world Kashmiris is moulded on the western myth must be free of fences, barriers, fortified of a lost, unregainable Paradise: hence, borders and checkpoints. Any dense and Shalimar, the verdant Mughal garden of tight network of social bonds, and ‘Kashmir, in a time before memory’ is a particularly a territorially rooted tight fallen Eden (4), soon to become part and network, is an obstacle to be cleared out parcel of the ‘multipolar, multicivilisational’ of the way. Global powers are bent on world politics and risk being swept away in dismantling such networks for the sake the tidal wave of an imminent ‘clash of of their continuous and growing fluidity, civilisations’ (Huntington 20, 28). For India that principal source of their strength Ophuls, whose father’s gesture of violent and the warrant of their invincibility’ interpellation has doomed to bear the weight (Bauman 14). of a burdensome, foreign toponym, being forcibly equated with the exotic province of While conceding to this spatial British colonialism is unacceptable: her own disengagement of power, these two novels ‘violent English history’ impels her to also record its provisional re-‘territo- journey in search of her maternal roots and rialisation’ and re-‘solidification’ through recuperate an original identity subsumed the resurgence of conflictual tensions and under the name of Kashmira. Nevertheless, their legitimating grand narratives in various her passage through a ‘magic portal’ does nodal points of the global network: revo- not return her to the Garden of Paradise; lutionary upheavals in Fury and global postlapsarian Kashmir, like Los Angeles, (counter)terrorism in Shalimar the Clown. like wartime Strasbourg, appears apoca- The west is still seen to be generating lyptic, entrenched in executions, police models for the east, but this is done at the brutality, explosions, riots: level of the hyperreal engendering the real ‘Everywhere was now a part of

everywhere else. Russia, America, adversarial model of 63 London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, power, relying on the con- flowed into one another’s, were no trast between the subor- longer our own, individual, discrete. […] dinates’ visible immobilisation in space and there were collisions and explosions. The the guards’ invisible yet assumed located- world was no longer calm’ (37). ness at the centre of the Panopticon, to the extra-territorial power-relations of ‘liquid In Shalimar the Clown, heavy modernity,’ when the chief hegemonic prac- modernity and its structural solidity are tices (such as ‘escape, slippage, elision and embodied in Max Ophuls, former American avoidance’) rely on the volatility, Ambassador to India, legislator, architect inaccessibility and spatial fluidity of the and, eventually, witness of the demise power elites (Bauman 11) – the very registered by the post-WWII international techniques appropriated by Shalimar, whose ‘narrative of emancipation’ (Lyotard 37): counterfeit passports and expert tightrope walking enables him to scour the secret ‘He tried to believe that the global lanes of the invisible world. structures he had helped to build, the While Professor Solanka is meta- pathways of influence, money and phorically chased out of America by the power, the multinational associations, the three Furies that haunt him for his Oresteian treaty organisations, the frameworks of sin, his puppets take on a life of their own, co-operation and law whose purpose had in the sense of triggering the revolutionary been to deal with a hot war turned cold, fervour that escalates across the globe, in would still function in the future that lay the half-real, half tongue-in-cheek republic beyond what he could foresee’ (Shalimar of Lilliput-Blefuscu. Solanka’s difficulty 20). resides in realising that this remote archipelago is more than a stage on which a Having survived the Holocaust, masque is being played out. That in the Ophuls nevertheless succumbs to the ‘golden age’ of technophiliac posthumanism ‘utopian fallacy’ of man’s perfectibility and consumerist ecstasy, fury can still have while at the same time upholding a a literal meaning, that conflicts keep Hobessian model of power, whereby a escalating and geopolitical borders still sovereign must by necessity and force demand redefinition. For Solanka, return contain the Leviathan’s natural aggressive home to his ‘damned Yoknapatawpha’ instincts. This philosopher-prince’s homi- (220) is possible not in the sense of either letic teachings to India – ambivalently virtual or corporeal homecoming (flying indebted to the confrontational strategies in east, thus simultaneously towards the future Machiavelli’s political thought and Sun and his past, he refuses transit in Bombay, Tzu’s art of war - include the story of the preferring to await take-off on board the ‘palace of power,’9 a Chinese-box, Pan- plane), but of recovering his familial optical structure of windowless rooms, ground, ending the cycle of parental aban- guarded by human-beast monsters, whom donment that generated his exile in the first one must progressively behead in order to place. All in all, albeit acknowledging the access the control chamber and its ever- complexities of cultural location in post- or elusive ‘man of true power.’ Max Opuls’s neocolonial situations, Rushdie does seem career as ‘maker of the world’ is coeval to privilege deterritorialisation as an active with the transition from this territorialized, pursuit of homelands of the imagination.

64 Travel becomes the figu- Civilisations and the Remaking of World rative translation – across Order. London: Simon & Schuster, 2002. increasingly fluidised Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History barriers – of multiply-localised selves, along and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1996. routes that fork, intersect, and perpetually Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel. defer the (chimerical) recuperation of roots. Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996. Leeming, David Adams. ‘The Chimera’ Bibliography: in Malcolm South (ed.), Mythical and Fabulous Creatures: A Source Book and Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the Research Guide. New York: Greenwood End. Trans. Chris Turner. Cambridge: Press, 1987 Polity Press, 1994. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simul- (1955). Trans. John Weightman & Doreen ation. (1981) Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Weightman. New York: Penguin, 1992 Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Press, 1994. Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Booth, Ken & Tim Dunne. Worlds in Press, 1984. Collision. Terror and the Future of Global McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Order. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, London: Routledge, 1987. 2002. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmo- Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. Em- dernism. London & New York: Routledge, bodiment and Sexual Difference in 1992. Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Columbia University Press, 1994. Travel Writing and Transculturation. New Clifford, James. ‘Notes on Travel and York: Routledge, 1992. Theory’ in Inscriptions, vol. 5 1989. Rushdie, Salman. ‘The Art of Fiction’ Clifford, James, ‘Travelling Cultures.’ in (interview). The Paris Review No. 174 Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Summer 2005 http://parisreview.com/ Nelson, Paula Treichler (Eds.). New York viewmedia.php/prmMID/5531 & London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 96-116. Rushdie, Salman. Fury. London: Connor, Steven. The Book of Skin. Jonathan Cape, 2001. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Deleuze Gilles & Felix Guattari. Anti- Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Granta Books in association with Viking Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen Penguin, 1991. R. Lane. London: The Athlone Press, 1984. Rushdie, Salman. ‘Inside the Mind of Hetherington, Kevin. The Badlands of Jihadists’ (interview). New Perspectives Modernity. Heterotopia and Social Order- Quarterly, Volume 23 (Winter 2006) ing. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2006_wi Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture, nter/rushdie.html London & New York: Routledge, 1994. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of (1981). London: Vintage, 1995.

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and 65 Other Literary and Cultural Essays. Lon- Notes don: Granta Books, 2000. Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. 1http://www.contemporarywriters.com/auth Rushdie, Salman. Shame (1983). Lon- ors/?p=auth87 don: Vintage, 1995. 2 For excellent insights into ‘migration,’ Rushdie, Salman. The Ground Beneath ‘translation,’ and ‘hybridity’ as Rushdie’s Her Feet. New York: Picador, 1999. postcolonial metaphors, see Sanga (2001). Rushdie, Salman. ‘The Ground Beneath 3 George Steiner, Extraterritorial. Papers My Feet’. The Nation. Volume 273. Issue 2. on Literature and the Language Revolution. July 9, 2001. p. 42. London: Faber & Faber 1972, p. 21. Qtd. in Sanga, Jaina C. Salman Rushdie’s Post- Said, p. 174. colonial Metaphors. Migration, Translation, 4 See Su (550 & passim). Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalisation. 5 Rushdie’s exact syntagm here makes Westport, Connecticut & London: Green- reference to Shakil’s mutating into ‘ethical wood Press, 2001. zombie,’ given his ‘willed severance from Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange his past’ (Shame 127). Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, And Weir 6 See McHale (101). of Hermiston. Emma Letley (ed.). Oxford: 7 “The acceleration of modernity, of Oxford University Press, 1987. technology, of events and media, of all Su, John J. ’Epic of Failure: Disappoint- exchanges – economic, political and sexual ment as Utopian Fantasy in Midnight’s – has propelled us to ‘escape velocity,’ with Children,’ in Twentieth Century Literature, the result that we have flown free of the Winter 2001, Vol. 47, Issue 4, pp. 545-568. referential sphere of the real and of history” Velikovsky, Immanuel. Ciocnirea lumi- (Baudrillard, Illusion 1). lor (Worlds in Collision). (1950). Trans. 8 A distinction also adopted by Zygmunt Nicolae Constantinescu. Bucharest: Luc- Bauman (101). man, 2004. 9 Also explicitly related to James George Walker Bynum, Caroline. Metamor- Frazer’s ‘enchanted grove’ whence the phosis and Identity. New York: Zone ‘high priest of the golden bough’ is Books, 2001. violently removed (Shalimar 16).