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Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie Are Three

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Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie Are Three CONCLUSION Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie are three immigrant writers who have been praised for their use of imagination in their engagement with the mutual inter-affect of their different heritages. As authors who have left their countries of origin, but also taken their cultures with them, as Ondaatje argued, they have persistently faced the question of their ethnic and cultural authenticity. Their migration, as Rushdie has emphasized, not only brings about the sense of uprootedness, cultural estrangement and existential angst, but also the possibility to rework existential issues of meaning, individuality, community, and perhaps most importantly, freedom and authenticity. In their countries of origin, the search for authenticity arises from a desire for political freedom, a most pertinent issue for postcolonial subjects. At the same time, they have been exposed to the long tradition of thinking about and asserting individual freedom in their European contexts. Rather than simply choosing between the seemingly opposed alternatives of community and individuality, these authors use fictional spaces to experiment with news ways of being free, being singular and yet also part of a community. Their novels The English Patient, The Famished Road and Midnight’s Children portray the ways in which postcolonial history causes the central characters’ existential angst and makes them socially estranged, isolated, solipsistic and individualistic. This condition becomes a step in a process of rethinking freedom, authenticity and community. In the political and cultural spaces they dramatize, freedom and authenticity are often appropriated within communalist and nationalist paradigms. Authenticity is then the question of social ties, shared myths, proper communal belonging, duties, patriotism, that is, different forms of heritage. Given that the novels often present heritage as burdensome, as a dead weight that hampers individual development, it is no surprise that they also thematize freedom as an unburdening from such weight. Freedom 212 Ways of Being Free from “dead habits, dead ways of seeing, dead ways of living”1 initially takes the direction of what I have called “individualism”, the ideal of a self as a self-sufficient. At the same time, these narratives are imaginative experiments that bring to crisis these generally relevant issues and concepts. In many ways, the novels engage the political and philosophical traditions that have dealt with the issues of freedom, authenticity, selfhood, singularity and community. The most prominent source of influence seems to be European existentialism. As Rushdie argued in a recent radio interview with Jian Ghomeshi, the historical period of the 1960s left his generation with hope that change is possible and that singulars can contribute to the shaping of their world. To juxtapose the politically charged postcolonial contexts of these novels to the European heritage of existentialist thought on freedom yields a creative dialogue in which hardly any belief is left unchallenged. If critical thought, at least since Adorno, has been overtly negative towards the heritage generally labelled “existentialism”, the literature I selected seems much more open both to influences from this rather heterogeneous legacy as much as any other and a creative reworking of it. The fictional space, with its characteristic plasticity, more easily accommodates as well as contrasts (and puts into conflict) several discourses, beliefs and ideologies. Since literature, as Okri has claimed, does not need to submit to the demands of an analytical (and maybe even hermeneutic) thought, since it does not need to deliver final conclusions and solutions to certain problems, it can bring out the aporias of thinking as well as it can articulate the paradoxes of living. It can provide more space for an exploration of how similar concerns can lead to different articulations. There are two concerns that drive the narratives. The first is the question of singular freedom and authenticity (its articulations and limits). The second is the question of community in its relation to individuality. I have elaborated on both similarities and difference between the novels. I will now recapture some main points that seem to pertain to all of them and explore their further implications. The novels describe the dissolution of traditional communities and a re-aggregating of community on a larger scale of the nation states. Instead of integrating in these imaginary communities, the characters 1 Okri, Songs of Enchantment, 289..
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