Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH more

Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh Beotriz Penos Ibanez Jose Angel Garcia Landa University ofZaragoza, Spain ABSTRACT This chapter analyses Salman Rushdie's novel The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of narrative voice and of intertextu- ality within the interpretive act, and their implications for the study of intercultural understanding, the postmodern treatment of the exotic, of truth and of the constructedness of the subject. Intertextuality becomes a central literary strategy whose function is to accommodate a multiplicity of cultural discourses and to articulate a postcolonial perspective on exoticism. In The Moor's Last Sigh Rushdie acknowledges the cultural and historical positioning of the reading and writing of narrative fiction, and reflects on the nature of the limits between the visual and verbal text as well as the more general one between fiction and history, and uses his individual historical locus (the aftermath of the Rushdie affair) in order to play with the generic frames activated in reading different kinds of texts. If'exoticism' is a perspectival phenomenon originated by the encounter of two cultures, writers whose work is multicultural in origin as well as in readership are surely a major influence on the ideological articulation of exoticism - and on its deconstruction. Salman Rushdie became such an author when he won a Booker Prize in 1981 (and a Booker of Bookers in 1993) with Midnight's Children, a postmodernist novel about India and its multiple representations. The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, dealt more specifically with cultural confrontations in Britain as well as in India, although the culture shocks represented in the work were over- shadowed by the all too real culture shock surrounding the Rushdie affair.1 It is in the wake of this affair that Salman Rushdie is read 1 On 14 February 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran announced that Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and 'all involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death'. This 'fatwa' generated heated debate about freedom of speech, interethnic relations, and the author's own intentions and predicament. Postmodern Studies 197 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh nowadays as a world author, an intercultural novelist writing from a unique position, and a highly problematic one - right from the eye of the storm of the present-day debate on the issues of intercultural represen- tation and tolerance, marginal cultural traditions and their fate in the westernised postmodern world. Rushdie, too, is a writer peculiarly concerned with issues of tolerance, free speech, plurality, and the fate of enlightenment in a postcolonial context. Although Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) was more than a mere children's book, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) was Rushdie's first major novel since the Satanic Verses affair, and deserves attention as the literary statement of one of the key present-day intercultural mediators. The Moor's Last Sigh is set in India for the most part, but it begins and ends in Spain, the place where the hero writes the fictional memoir we read as a novel. It is a double story - the story of Moor, of his Indian family and his country, as well as the story of a story, of how and why Moor came to write it. Spanish readers are in a privileged position to recognise the intertextual allusion in the title, which refers to Boabdil, the Moorish king who lost the kingdom of Granada. After his famous sigh Boabdil was chided by his mother for not being able to defend his kingdom like a man. This is a story of goodbyes to lost worlds, of disil- lusion in the face of cultural and religious disintegration, a story about the definition of the boundaries and essence of a nation. The Moor's Last Sigh is about definitions and belonging: an investigation on what can make an individual part of the community or marginal to it. And, if placed in the margin, how a margin is often repressed, and sometimes exoticised. Rushdie's tale is also a story about the definition of narrative boundaries, about the difficulty of isolating a central story from others that criss-cross within it. For instance, the story of Rushdie's hero somehow refunctionalises the story of Boabdil. This is done in an overtly theatrical way, with reflexive gestures that point at the artificiality of the motivation. This kind of refiexivity often appears in historiographic metafictions, novels that rework and problematize narratives from the past.2 In this sense, The Moor's Last Sigh is written in a mode already familiar to readers aware of Rushdie's previous work. It is a minor 2 On historiographic metafiction, see Hutcheon (1988). The self-consciousness of historio- graphic metafiction should be seen as a modulation of the structural refiexivity of modern writing (as described, for instance, in Barthes 1971). 198 Postmodern Studies Beatriz Penas Ibanez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa (though lengthy) work, not as ambitiously experimental as Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses, and not as politically significant as Shame (1983).3 But it does include contributions of its own to the histo- riographic-metafictional mode. In this paper we shall focus on the novel's use of metafiction, on the cultural assumptions of its multivocal and intertextual programme, and on the thematisation of Rushdie's authorial position. The complex intertwining of fictional narrative and metanarrative in The Moor's Last Sigh constitutes a privileged site for the articulation of intertextual dialogue and (inter)cultural discourses.4 Moreover, in artic- ulating these discourses, the novel also constructs models of the self. It should be understood that this triple articulation (intersubjective, inter- textual, intercultural) is explicitly coded in the work. This triple coding positions readers on a playground, demanding from them a high level of interaction with text and context. The reader becomes Rushdie's accom- plice within as well as without the novel. In other words, the reader is invited to share with the writer an encyclopaedic universe of discourse made of prior readings and vast cultural information which includes popular and academic knowledge of history, geography, mythology, society, and art. All of these discourses play a role in the understanding of this polyphonic novel. Moraes Zogoiby, nicknamed 'Moor', recalls the historical Boabdil in his subjection to a powerful mother figure. Moor's mother, Aurora Zogoiby, becomes in some ways the real protagonist of the novel. This is expressed in one central scene in the book (depicted in the original cover) that shows the picture of Moor's mother emerging, palimpsest-like, under the solitary image of Boabdil that has been painted on it. Aurora, like Moor the writer, is an artist, and it is her paintings that provide the ground for a metatextual commentary on the theory of art generating the novel.' Aurora's paintings and Moor's narrative are texts in a different semiotic medium which narrate in two different modes a complicated family saga. The main elements articulating the semiotic 3 This seems to have been the general assessment among reviewers, although an occasional review may rate it higher (see Chanda 1995). There are also, of course, downright hostile reviews (Wallia 1996). 4 Authors like Kroetsch (in Kenyon 1985), Delbaere (1992), or Pamuk (1995) point out the relevance of the dialectics of marginal versus dominant cultures to the understanding of magic realism as a form of intercultural communication. See also the contributions in Zamora and Faris, eds. (1995). Postmodern Studies 199 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh complexity of these visual and verbal narratives are both formal and thematic. The work thematises the ethnic and cultural diversity of the family's background. Moor's mother, nee Aurora da Gama, comes from a wealthy Catholic family of Portuguese ancestry, a living relic of the first wave of European colonialism in India. The wealth of this Indian- Portuguese family still rests on the traditionally colonial spice trade. Moor's paternal descent is also problematically Indian: his father Abraham Zogoiby is of Sephardim Jewish origin, but claims descent, on the grounds of a dubious family legend, from the Moorish king Boabdil, whose nickname 'El-zogoybi' meant 'the unfortunate'.5 On the other hand, the text leads us to infer that Moor is actually the son of Prime Minister Nehru. Genealogies in Rushdie's novels are usually doubtful,6 and Moor's true origin is but one of the family secrets which are only partly unravelled. So, even in the mysterious origin of Moor Zogoiby"s name we find a story of mixed blood and cultures, emigration and exile: the early Islamic jihad and the eighth-century invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, the Moorish kingdom of Granada, the fifteenth-century expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Spain, the resulting Sephardim exile in the eastern Mediterranean. This is not the first time Rushdie looks back to an (ideally) multicultural and tolerant society that comes to an end, be it Spanish Al-Andalus or Bombay.7 This aspect of the novel takes us back to Midnight's Children, a sister-text to The Moor's Last Sigh in Rushdie's work.8 It might be argued whether any of these multi- cultural Utopias would bear closer historical examination - but Rushdie himself is not naive in this sense; rather, he is interested in the processes which lead societies to change for the worse. What is stressed in The Moor's Last Sigh is the growth of nationalism radicalised by interethnic intolerance and the loss of a space for freedom and exchange, however precarious. The main menace in this novel's plot comes from the Hindu fundamentalist party led by Raman Fielding. A grim irony, since the 5 Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh (hereafter MLS), p. 83. 6 See, for instance, Harrison's account of Saleem's genealogy in Midnight's Children (1992: 7 On Bombay as an emblem of multicultural tolerance, see MLS 392. In spite of their overall reservations on the book, the reviews by Coetzee (1996) and Pamuk (1995) appreciate the novel's multicultural programme and its cultural analysis of identity. 8 See Brigg (1994). The term 'sister-texts' as a specific type of intertextuality is proposed by Jefferson (1990). In fact, Aadam Aziz and Zeenat Vakil, as well as other minor characters from Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, appear once again in this novel (Thathachari 1995) - but these should be read as reminders of common thematic concerns, rather than a serious attempt at a sequel or at an Indian Comedie humaine. 200 Postmodern Studies Beatriz Penas Ibafiez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa doctrinal looseness and catholicity of Hinduism used to be a symbol of multicultural tolerance in Rushdie's novels.9 In the face of harsh reality, the novel sets itself up as the substitute space where multiplicity is not only tolerated but constitutive. Rushdie's novels formally exploit and develop the polyphonic dimension of the genre that has been theorised by Bakhtin and his followers.10 Here as in Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, Rushdie writes a novel of 'inclusion' rather than 'exclusion'; they are novels which celebrate variety, hybridity, impurity, metamorphoses resulting from cross- cultural contact; as the author says, they revel in their rejection of the absolutism of the Pure.11 Rushdie's Bombay (present-day Mumbai), the city of many cultures and many voices, is central to the novel's imaginary. We are taken on a tour through the city following the thread of a plot in which Moor, like a picaro, shuttles between the languages and doings of various social spheres. The strand of the story which weaves them all together tells how within a disintegrating society the Zogoiby family business degen- erates into a crime trust dealing in drugs, prostitution, political corruption, and illegal arms trade. Abraham Zogoiby eventually becomes a criminal tycoon controlling the Bombay underworld. This public plot culminates in the chaos of generalised gang wars and terrorism.12 In contrast, Aurora, Abraham's wife and Moor's mother, becomes a celebrated painter, a national icon. Her richly contradictory personality makes her stand for Mother India herself: although ironic distancing devices are not spared, the main characters in the novel are still national emblems, as they were in Midnight's Children. Aurora's postmodernist paintings, or 'panto-pictures', are in some respects reminiscent of Frida Kahlo's style. The lengthy descriptions of these pictures and their thematic significance make the novel a noteworthy experiment in 9 On the multiculturaVmultivocal potential of Hinduism as used by Rushdie, see Harrison (1992:16-21, 50-1). 10 See e.g. Bakhtin (1981, 1984), Kristeva (1980), Todorov (1984), and Holquist (1990). 11 We paraphrase Rushdie (interview with Morrison 1990, quoted in Martinez Bernardo 1991: 150). The opposition between the inclusive and the exclusive work of art could of course be traced back at least as far as the New Critical notion of pure versus impure poetry (e.g. Warren 1943). 12 Raman Fielding, the novel's baddy, is a caricature of Bal Thackeray, the influential leader of the fascist Shiv Sena party ruling Maharashtra. And once again, Rushdie's satire led to censorship: The Moor's Last Sigh was banned in India immediately after its release (Spaeth 1995; Grewal, ed. 1996). Postmodern Studies 201 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh ecphrasis (Coetzee 1996: 14).13 The pictures unveilingly portray the unconscious or underlying conflicts in Indian society and in her own family and self. Aurora, the personification of Indian art, is witness to and victim of all these conflicts, which are narrated from Moor's point of view. The narrative is structured around Moor's unravelling of his past, and is told from his present situation of despair and loss. Moor loses his mother's affection as a result of the malevolent influence and the deceitful stories of his mad lover Uma.14 A sequence of anagnorises lets him discover the true reasons of his estrangement from his family. He also learns the real circumstances of his mother's death (it was ordained by his father Abraham). Moor's sense of loss and the dangerous unfolding of the crime plot will eventually force him to leave Bombay and travel to Spain in order to recapture his past, symbolised by the portrait of Aurora he knows is kept there. It is as a prisoner of the portrait's owner that he is obliged to compose his narrative. The result of Moor's learning process is an ironic Bildungsroman: there is no future awaiting the character after the last page of the novel. As in Midnight's Children, the ending of the novel is underscored metafictionally by means of the parallel physical disintegration of the narrator. In this sense the work is profoundly pessimistic and escapist: At the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my finger- tips read them for me. RIP. Very well: I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full of sleepers waiting for their moment of return. Arthur sleeps in Avalon, Barbarossa in his cave. Fin MacCool lies in the Irish hillsides and the worm Ouroboros on the bed of the Sundering Sea. Australia's ancestors, the Wandjina, take their ease underground, and somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty in a . glass coffin awaits a prince's kiss. See: here is my flask. I'll drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I'll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to our family's old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time. {MLS 433-4) 13 'Ecphrasis' may be defined as the narrative description and dynamisation of pictures and other static works of art; the classic example is the description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad. 14 Possibly inspired, according to Hamilton (1995-6:107) by Rushdie's former wife, the writer Marianne Wiggins. Walton (1999) provides a Lacanian reading of the destructive Oedipal plot linking Moor and Aurora. 202 Postmodern Studies Beatriz Penas Ibanez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa It is clear that any hope expressed in this final passage belongs to a mythical apocalyptic time, not to the time of history. For Rushdie, it is only in myth and fiction that the illusion of salvation can be preserved and the recovery of what has been lost achieved. The novel becomes then a symphony in the key of nostalgic recollec- tion rather than an expression of hope: Now, therefore, it is meet to sing of endings; of what was, and may be no longer; of what was right in it, and wrong. A last sigh for a lost world, a tear for its passing. Alas, however, a last.... A Moor's tale, complete with sound and fury.... {MLS 4) These passages clearly show the way intertextuahty makes meaning in Rushdie's narrative. The unsaid, implied through intertextual allusion, acquires as much importance as what is actually said. The double allusion to Shakespeare's Macbeth and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury looms behind Rushdie's own text strengthening the motifs of the corruption and decadence of a passing world. On looking at the former passage we learn that the tales and legends of lost (or losing) peoples (Celts, Old Irish, New York Dutch, or Australian Aboriginals) serve as an analogue for the Moor's story: at once his personal mongrel story, the story of the Jewish and Indian-Portuguese minorities doomed to extinc- tion, and the story of multicultural India threatened by the growth of religious, political, and linguistic fundamentalism. Danger arises from within, and Bombay will fall like Granada, just as Boabdil... was too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting. For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins.... [Tjhere was and is evil beyond our frontiers as well as within. {MLS 372) Aurora's series of paintings on the subject of Moor represented as Boabdil becomes a metatextual statement on the novel itself. These portraits force on the narrator the feeling that he himself is growing into Aurora's Boabdil, that lozenged, party-coloured Moor whose tragedy - the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One - had been the sequence's uniting principle. {MLS 408) Postmodern Studies 203 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh As may be seen in this extract, the narrator uses Aurora's fantastic pictures as a way of interpreting his experience, and seems always on the verge of crossing the frame into the pictures. The pictures offer them- selves as an iconic counter-text to the narrative, and their magic and fantasy bring to the surface the lines of force organising social and personal conflicts in the narrated world. They also become a metatex- tual exploration of the action by miming the conflicts operative within the verbal narrative's text and context. The (narrated) presence of this visual counter-text dramatically high- lights as well the relationship between the magical and the realistic elements. Magical realism has often been described as the literature of the postmodern/postcolonial experience.15 Since Rushdie is considered one of the prime practitioners of this mode, it is relevant to examine the traces and evolution of the magical realistic technique in The Moor's Last Sigh. Strictly speaking, there are no magical or fantastic occurrences in the action proper. The source of the fantastic is the intertext, the myste- rious intertwining of texts and discourses in which we are immersed from the start. These texts become keys to a reality which otherwise would be elusive. We can interpret experience only through tropological displacement. Rushdie deliberately exploits this principle in his narrative: the intertexts provide analogies for the action; they conjure up roads for interpretation which otherwise would remain closed. In this novel Rushdie carefully dissects the interdiscursive nature of experi- ence. The postmodern subject appropriates a wealth of images, stories, registers, coming from a multiplicity of media and cultures. They are discourses that become constitutive of the self and cannot be alienated from it. Rushdie's own writing is an exercise in the assimilation of variety and multiplicity; as in his previous novels, it is through its multi- vocal style, through the richness and elasticity of the narrative voice, the verbal juggling and play with widely different registers that the novel most successfully makes its point.16 Once again Rushdie thema- tises the over-abundance, the all-inclusiveness of his style by means of narrative icons - for instance in the scenes describing walls and floors covered by frescoes or tiles profusely decorated and charged with histor- 15 See e.g. Slemon (1988); Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989:28); Brennan (1989); Delbaere (1992) Pamuk (1995). 16 Reviewers bow here: Chanda (1995); Pamuk (1995). On multivocality and social dialogism in Rushdie's early work, see Brennan (1994: 118), Bharucha (1994), Engblom (1994). 204 Postmodern Studies Beatriz Penas Ibanez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa ical and mythical figures of all kind and origin.17 This joyful abundance is associated in Aurora's paintings with the multicultural civilisation of India: [T]hese were polemical pictures, in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India. (MLS 227)18 As already mentioned, the identity of the subject, in the novel as well as in a larger context, can be categorised only as a conglomerate of attitudes and responses modelled on an intertextual horizon. The novel explicitly thematises this state of affairs, by having Moor define himself, seen through Aurora's pictures, as a palimpsest and a patchwork: [A] masked, particoloured harlequin, a patchwork or quilt of a man; or, as his old skin dropped from him chrysalis-fashion, standing revealed as a glorious butterfly, whose wings were a miraculous composite of all the colours in the world. (MLS 226-7). The postmodern individual appropriates all these discourses through an act of interpretation which foregrounds certain modes of being and perceiving versus others, which remain backgrounded. For the indi- vidual, certain modes constitute the norm, others are subcategorised as marginal, sometimes repressed, and others are exoticised. These cate- gorisations are present both within the action of a novel and in the reading process, in the reader's cognitive interaction with it. Rushdie is highly aware of the importance of intertextuality as a means, and of exoticism as a theme within his novels and as an interpretive frame for his western readers. He points out the pitfalls of exoticism as a stereo- typical mode of non-understanding which aestheticises and domesticates 'secret wildness into a pretty frock' (MLS 14). Certain forms of art tend to follow the principle denounced by Moor: Tsecause more exotic, more beautiful' (MLS 13); they use the picturesqueness of marginality to mask real facts and render them 'more palatable'. In the above-quoted passage, the words 'secret wildness' specifically allude to 17 See, for example MLS 59, 75, 84. 18 See also MLS 60-1. Compare with the 'potential for darkness as well as for light' contained in pluralism and hybridity (MLS 303), and 'corruption as the only force we had that could defeat fanaticism' (MLS 332). Postmodern Studies 205 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh homosexuality (another kind of marginality after all) but they could be applied to a whole set of strategies for referring to the other and differ- ence.19 Rushdie also lays bare western readers' conventional expectations towards the East and towards his own writing: Christians, Portuguese and Jews ... skirts not saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns ... can this really be India? ... no way: Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then: this too is an Indian yarn. That's one answer, but here's another: everything in its place. Elephants are promised for later. (MLS 87) Once again, Rushdie's implied reader seems to be a Westerner acquainted with India mainly through the lenses of exoticism and orientalism.20 Rushdie confronts these readers' expectations with his own literary expertise. By heavily relying on intertextual references, he manages to create a decentred discursive universe in which no voice is assigned a dominant role.21 Consequently, no voice can be used as the norm against which the others are, first, measured and, then, rendered exotic or marginal. Dominance is not even assigned to the voice of the narrator, call him Moor or Rushdie's persona, which is, rather, characterised by its syncretic quality. Syncretism here acts on a double plane, the cultural (contextual) and the narratological (textual and intertextual). As a character, Moor's voice speaks in English but it is tinted with influences coming from an intercultural background which synthesises East and West, Christian, Muslim, Semitic, and Hindu influences. Moor's discourse as a narrator is not unitary. His voice partakes of the different possibilities of the I-narration, which lets him speak sometimes as a character and first-person narrator, sometimes as an omniscient narrator, and other times as the unmedi- ated voice of the author, that is, as Rushdie himself facing his narrative, passing judgement on it and on the circumstances surrounding its 19 Orhan Pamuk's review of The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) denounces Rushdie's 'magic realism' as effecting precisely this aesthetisation, without acknowledging the fact that Rushdie's writing reflexively thematises this predicament. Rushdie has been overtly critical of the neocolonialist ideology implicit in Raj nostalgia films and television series (see Rushdie 1983a, 1983b, 1984). 20 Cf. Hand (1991: 65). On Orientalism see Said (1979). 21 On the concept of'dominant' in aesthetics, see Jakobson (1978). 206 Postmodern Studies Beatriz Penas Ibdfiez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa production.22 We hear this voice, for instance, when the narrator looks at his mother's art, and implicitly also at the novel itself, with a distanced eye: The picture, painted like many of the mature Moors in the layered manner of the old European masters ... seemed to me to demon- strate that art, ultimately, was not life; that what might feel tmthful to the artist - for example, this tale of malevolent usurpation, of a pretty witch come to separate a mother from her son - did not neces- sarily bear the slightest connection to events and feelings and people in the real world. (MLS 247) In Moor's description of Aurora's pictorial aesthetic the novel's reflex- ivity is patent once more. The evolution in Aurora's pictures mirrors to some extent the evolution of Rushdie's art (Pamuk 1995: 33). He describes The 'Moor in exile' sequence ... born of a passionate irony that had been ground down by pain.... Almost every piece contained elements of collage, and over time these elements became the most dominant features of the series. The unifying narrator/narrated figure of the Moor was usually still present, but was increasingly discarded as jetsam, and located in an environment of broken and discarded objects. (MLS 301) As he does in his previous work, Rushdie presents the pictorial exuber- ance of an artist as an analogue of his own polyphonic style.23 But it is only in this novel that the actual ecphrastic description of these images acquires a central thematic and architectural role. The overabundance and multiplicity in both Aurora's pictures and Moor's narrative are consistent with the main ideological theme of the novel, the advocacy of tolerance and the need for a sanctuary for differ- ence. In the present-day world, uniformity, a by-product of the 22 Coetzee is impatient not only with the loose construction of the plot but also with the author's seeming lapses into 'what sounds very much like propria persona' (1996: 13). Rushdie's readers had better be warned that his novels may have many virtues, but a neat classical/realist construction is not one of them! Coetzee, incidentally, won the Booker Prize the year Shame was published. Rushdie made his disagreement with the verdict known, 'and there were stories of spilled wine and angry words at the ceremony' (Hamilton 1995-6: 105). 23 Cf. The painter in Midnight's Children whose works grow out of control, or Rani Harapa's embroidered shawls described in Shame (210-14). Postmodern Studies 207 T Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh mass-media treatment of events, threatens diversity. Cultural multi- plicity can disappear together with minority groups, their languages and myths. Literature, like Avalon, gives shelter to the memory of the past and the openness of discourse. This is the ethical dimension of Rushdie's aesthetics, a political aesthetics indeed. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the reception of Rushdie's literature has been followed by reactions which go so far beyond the aesthetic as to compromise Rushdie's personal safety. In The Moor's Last Sigh, as in Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses, Rushdie writes a polyphonic novel in the tradition of Menippean satire, the tradition of Rabelais, Sterne, or Joyce. His own satire is a medley of comedy, grotesquery, intellectual speculation, jokes, obscenity, narrative, parody, and other satirical devices in this tradition. The mixture of tones, setting against each other romance, comedy, tragedy, and irony culminates in Rushdie's writing in an overabundance of both subject matter and forms. By incorporating a multitude of perspectives and an encyclopaedic approach to its subject, his multi- registered narrative undermines fundamentalist and absolute versions of truth. Fiction writing becomes here an exercise in tolerance through reminiscing experience in all its specificity and variety. It is an exercise in exposing the falsity of simplifying grand narratives - for instance, the nationalist myths telling of Portuguese, British, or Hindu supremacy, the narratives which only allow for one dominant voice to be heard. Rushdie's work repeatedly denounces the danger of abiding by one sole text; it fears the 'one-dimensionality of a straight line' (Midnight's Children 150). With reference to The Satanic Verses, Rushdie advocated an enlightened acceptance of cultural difference: Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transfor- mation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. (Rushdie 1990: 4) Arguably, the plot of The Moor's Last Sigh provides a less successful framework than that of The Satanic Verses for the working out of these Beatriz Penas Ibanez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa concerns. The author's personal and biographical investment in the figure of the protagonist also gives the work a more limited scope, and the backdrop for the work portrays tragic consequences of cultural conflict as well as its enriching potential. The novel is clearly the work of an embattled author; as the title indicates, it is a lamentation for the doom of hybridity rather than a breezy celebration. But Rushdie's continuing commitment to cultural multiplicity and cross-impregnation is all the more significant if we bear in mind the high stakes of the game, and take his own ordeal as proof for it. Rushdie is a world author in the sense that his work relies heavily on the contact between different cultural perspectives and traditions, which is so characteristic of the postcolonial period.24 It is in this context that we should understand the function of intertextuality in Rushdie's work.25 Intertextuality, a pragmatic contrastive strategy, is favoured by postmodernist literary discourse because it helps to accommodate a multiplicity of cultural voices which articulate within the text a new perspective on exoticism. As such, intertextual voicing provides a coun- terpart to the pre-modernist treatment of difference and alien discourses as 'the exotic'. Rushdie's postmodernist approach to multiculturalism leaves no ground on which to segregate a cultural formation as 'exotic' However, he does intertextually acknowledge the discourse of exoticism as a heritage that may help explain some present-day formations. In spite of its polyphonic multiplicity, the novel does not dissolve into a chaos of allusions.26 A dialectic is established between diversity and unity. A plurality of presentational tactics (narrative techniques, genres, registers, moods, voices) is typical of polyphonic writing, and part of an intentional design. Rushdie, like any author in control of his material, tries to impose meaning and shape, and this is done in an innovative way precisely through the conscious, reflexive use of plurivocality.27 24 On 'world writers' see Brennan (1989) and Harrison (1992: 125-9). Brennan seems to regard Rushdie and other 'world authors' as a necessary evil, and as the inevitable accom- plices of neocolonialism. Brennan's perspective certainly illuminates some problems inherent in 'world-writing' but is quite unfair from a western perspective (it is true that Brennan prefers to side with Fanon and Castro). James Harrison's view is more balanced: 'As a writer who exemplifies both excess and variety, Rushdie is almost bound, like a seventeen-course meal, to offend the taste of someone' (1992:128). 25 On intertextuality in earlier works by Rushdie, see e.g. Wilson (1994), Merivale (1994), Al- =Azm (1994). 26 For Coetzee, though, the final chapters are frantic and overwritten' (1996:13). 27 Reviewers who complain of the looseness of the novel (e.g. Pamuk 1995: 4) do not really acknowledge the centrality of intertextuality and refiexivity, focusing instead on the plot as if it were a simple-minded soap opera. 208 Postmodern Studies Postmodern Studies 209 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh The material text is represented in the first and last chapters as a sequence of loose leaves which Moor, the author, has scattered and nailed onto trees and doors. This is on the one hand an allusion to Luther nailing up his Protestant theses at Wittenberg; on the other hand, it is a metatextual reminder of the openness of the text, of the fact that a book can only be given unity, bound, by the reader following up the narrative and gathering its multiple constituents into an interpretive whole. Rushdie is aware that the book he offers as a bound volume is a composite of discourses which heavily draws on other kinds of texts and points in a multitude of directions. This variety might lead the reader astray, and make the book sink into meaninglessness. The reader is required to pay full attention. One character in the novel puts it as follows: People are inattentive, by and large. They do not read closely, but skim. They are not expecting to be sent messages in code, and so they may not see any. (MLS 422) The reader may fail to spot and interpret, therefore failing to recover meanings signalled by the intertextual clue. These covert meanings have to be acknowledged as being on a par with more obvious ones because they indirectly provide much of the glue holding the text together. In this sense Rushdie's theory of reading and his theory of the subject are of one piece. A human being is basically a reader, a user of various texts who communicates through them both with others and with him/herself. Thence the importance of attentive reading for the under- standing of the self and of the other; but in any case the risk of misun- derstanding or over-interpreting remains. Rushdie plays with the meanings of the Urdu word insaan, human being, and of its English false friend 'insane'. Moor discovers that his lover Uma is mad, that her self as he knows it is only a fiction, a provisional persona, that her love for him is role-playing.28 Still he insists on her share of humanity: she is 'insaan', human (MLS 322). Later, insanity is linguistically associated with reading: 'Lectura - locura' (MLS 386). Moor recalls those Spanish words on the doorway of a school building in the Andalusian village of 28 Uma is therefore the incarnation of the negative and destructive side of multiplicity, as the narrator self-consciously notes (MLS 272); the lack of moral objectivity and ground is also associated to political corruption. T i J Beatriz Penas Ibanez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa Erasmo - an allusion to Erasmus of Rotterdam, his Praise of Folly (in Spanish, Elogio de la locura, 'praise of insanity'), and his call for a critical perspective on reading and doctrine. We may also point out the connec- tion between Moor's name and the Greek word moria, Erasmus's folly.29 The novel also alludes to another wise fool, fictional Don Quixote. There is a continuum in this novel going from insanity, through lying, invention, and fiction, to art. The fantasies of Moor's lover, Uma, are destructive lies, like Iago's (Moor is also Othello, of course) (MLS 225). Aurora's fantasies, on the other hand, are creative and insightful. But Rushdie acknowledges both types of lie, the destructive and the constructive, as human and necessary to writer and reader, and this is clear from the initial passage. We cannot discount the element of deceit and madness in reality as well as art; we must acknowledge that it may be present in communication (just as Uma is unreliable, Moor may be an unreliable narrator, and Rushdie himself may be unreliable too).30 The reader must engage actively with the text, and accept that it cannot be under complete control: our reading, too, may contain an element of self-deceit and madness. A multiplicity of perspectives and intertexts is not, therefore, the only reason why coherent interpretations are difficult to achieve. It is the singularity of general cognition and human experi- ence and also of a particular reading that endows the process of under- standing and interpretation with its idiosyncratic quality of openness. According to Couturier, reading a novel is a process that also involves the reader's play with the figure of the author. Authors disseminate their self, in the form of approximative replicas or partial selves, among the actants of the novel, a narrative masquerade required by the conven- tions of the genre, of the publishing industry and of social censorship. The reader's role involves the unmasking of the author, the reconstruc- tion of the authorial figure in order to allow empathic communication (Couturier 1995:22). This phenomenon may become especially pervasive in the case of authors like Rushdie - authors whose fame precedes the act of reading and inescapably brings intertexts of its own. 29 The word morosophoi is used by Erasmus to refer to those who step over the line dividing wisdom from folly. The word is used by Lucian and Rabelais and is therefore associated to the tradition of Menippean satire which has often been invoked as Rushdie's proper literary ascent. Erasmus dedicates the Praise of Folly (Greek moria) to Thomas More, punning on the latter's name, as Rushdie does with Moor. Incidentally, the Spanish name of Thomas More is Tomds Moro, 'Thomas Moor'. 30 On Rushdie's use of unreliable narrators see e.g. Booker (1994: 243). 210 Postmodern Studies Postmodern Studies 211 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh What makes Rushdie's novel peculiar in this respect and adds a distinctive tone to his voice is the reader's acute awareness and the high stakes of this particular interpretive game. Rushdie, as the author- figure, has a unique significance for his public; his personal predicament is a part of the story we read.31 Rushdie has become, in a way, a Scheherazade-figure: he must keep on telling tales in order to secure protection, and his life as a frame story mixes freely with his fictions. Moor, too, is forced to write his narrative in order to survive: 'He [the psychopathic painter Vasco Miranda] had made a Scheherazade of me. As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live' (MLS 421). This state of affairs leads us to expect stories that somehow allegorise Rushdie's plight (as happened inHaroun and the Sea of Stories or, in an astonishing feat of prophecy, in The Satanic Verses). In MLS, the author is aware that his readers are using the Rushdie affair as a powerful addi- tional subtext for the novel. Thence in part the artificiality and theatricality of the figure of Moor, and the distancing devices which allow Rushdie to exploit his allegorical meanings without losing overall control - for instance, there is an element of self-parody in his descrip- tion of the painting by Vasco Miranda called, like the book, The Moor's Last Sigh: 'the kitsch excess of Vasco Miranda's lachrymose self-portrait en arabe' (MLS 180). There is an apparent lack of consistency between the narrative voice, authorial-like, self-conscious and knowledgeable, and the character it is supposed to come from, Moor, the unreliable narrated I. The motivation of the narrative act is conventional (in the way of eighteenth-century 'manuscript' narratives) but in this novel, paradoxically, convention amounts to a baring of the device: the existence of the novel is justified through the manuscript Moor is forced to write, but this motivation self-destructs when the leaves of the manu- script are scattered. The narrative voice uses the first person pronoun T as a mask pointing at its own conventionality and ontological duplicity. As already mentioned, the first-person voice belongs both to Rushdie and to Moor. This is acknowledged early in the novel: On the run, I have turned the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. 31 Cf. Aurora's predicament: 'Painted on walls, caricatured in the papers, the maker of images became an image herself (MLS 116). 212 Postmodern Studies Beatriz Penas Ibafiez and Jose Angel Garcia Landa When my pursuers have followed the trail they'll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn't've done it differently. (MLS 3) We should note that in this passage the pursuers are the readers as well as the Fatwah marksmen, and that Rushdie speaks out in Martin Luther's famous words ('I could not have done it differently') his protest against monological control of discourse and interpretation.32 He boldly uses the metaphor of the pirate's map to conflate the text of the world with the text of the novel;33 his trail in both cases leads his followers either to Rushdie the living man or to Moor, the personification of the authorial narrator. This quest for the treasure becomes allegorical of the quest for meaning latent in the reader's enterprise. In searching for Rushdie, the Fatwah followers mean his death; searching for the meaning of the novel, the 'fundamentalist' reader seeks to cancel its openness.34 In any case the enterprise is bound to be a momentary personal success, never a definitive step. The survival of Moor, or of Rushdie for that matter, is secured by their flight across cultural and textual borders. Moreover, Rushdie is also asserting his power to escape into freedom in another dimension. This is the dimension created by tradition in language and literature, in which the self transcends physical finitude by entering an ideal sanctuary of memory and preser- vation that transcends the opposition between synchrony and diachrony, and between the fictional and the historical. As a conclusion, The Moor's Last Sigh asserts that, against radical relativism as well as against fundamentalism, there stands an inter- subjective truth shared by the members of a humanistic tradition that reaches beyond the standard in language, ethnicity, class, and nation- ality. It is a tradition of long memory through which the record is kept of peoples past and of their lasting stories. Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the Living, must find what space we can 32 This phrase is also used to emphasize character and situation as every human being's ready-made personal fate; it recurs as a undertone refrain in the novel (MLS 215). 33 For a discussion of these concepts see Lotman (1994). 34 Commenting on earlier interpetations of his works, Rushdie rejected the attempt to foster any single limited interpretation of them, criticising the 'disease' of allegory characteristic of India (Rushdie 1985:3). Of course, Rushdie's writings do not escape from the allegorical frame of interpretation; rather, they play with it and reflexively thematise it. Postmodern Studies 213 Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep. (MLS: 136) It is a tradition which canonises some individuals, the giant dead, as examples not free from ideological manipulation but still representative of those features of humanity which have made us what we are. Defining himself as part of that tradition, Salman Rushdie asserts in this novel his will to write, survive and last. Thus we clung to humanity, and refused to allow our captivity define us. (MLS 424) * * * Beatriz Penas gratefully acknowledges the financial aid provided by the University of Zaragoza research programme (Vicerrectorado de Investigation project no. 245-38,1995-6), which has allowed her to carry out this research. Jose Angel Garcia Landa gratefully acknowledges the financial aid provided by the DGICYT (Programa Sectorial de Promotion General del Conocimiento, proyecto PS94-0057), which has allowed him to carry out this research. Works cited AI-cAzm, Sadik Jalal. 1994. The importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie'. In Fletcher, ed. 1994: 255-92. Ashcroft, Bill Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikahil. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. -1984. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. 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