Abstract
Chapter 2 in the Dissertation: The Paradox of Mortality: Death, Doubles and Narrated Identity in the Pre-Fatwa Novels of Salman Rushdie
"Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity." (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 9)
In Midnight’s Children, the act of narrating performed by the homodiegetic narrator, Saleem Sinai, turns out to have a split narrative motor, in that it tries both to reach for the interminable – the act of postponing death through endless narrative by intertextually echoing Scheherazade’s act of narrating in The Thousand and One Nights – and to construct a monument that is complete and meaningful but also, as Brian McHale puts it, “presupposes the death of the one monumentalized” (Postmodernist Fiction 230). This paradoxical drive against and towards death and the end in the text is enhanced by the ongoing and repeated dichotomy between the ephemeral (represented by Scheherazade’s oral act of narrating, which the narrative continuously evokes) and the lasting (represented by Saleem’s attempt to construct a textual monument). Furthermore, this dichotomy is also embodied in Rushdie’s use of Shiva and Saleem as primary doubles in the narrative. Here Shiva takes on the dual role of his namesake in Hindu mythology as both destroyer and creator, thus embodying the ephemerality of change, while Saleem is given the role of the Hindu deity Vishnu, the preserver, through the attempts at “the chutnification of history” (MC 459) and his use of historiography to imbue his autobiographical story with centrality and meaning.
The dissertation investigates how Salman Rushdie’s pre-fatwa novels – i.e. Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1988) – present a theme that I have opted to call the paradox of mortality, which serves as an illustration of the contradictory struggle of comprehending and dealing with one’s own mortality. The readings of Rushdie’s novels focus on how this theme is constructed and expressed as a recurrent narrative desire for meaning, completeness and wholeness – in essence for a meaningful existence – which is simultaneously and paradoxically a desire for the end, that is, death.
