Homing Instincts

We're in the "home-stretch" now, too, I guess, or coming full circle, or merely arriving at our final class meeting (which is not in fact an end, I hope, being the intellectual migrants that we all are). It seems appropriate that we began our time together with Grace Nichols's declaration that "wherever I hang me knickers that's me home" and end with Okwe's emotional message to his daughter "I'm coming home." This class has been quite centrally concerned with the poetics of home, on so many levels (the family as nation, the national motherland, the alternative spaces and sanctuaries, the rhetoric of pedestrianism, the writer who is forced to move from one temporary home to the next to evade a fatwa, the exiles and migrants who know home as much as an idea as a geographical place, etc.). In contemplating the converging discourses of "the home" and "the nation" in Dirty Pretty Things (what ideas of the nation require these ghosted non-citizens to seek homes on rented couches and in the subterranean shelter of a crematorium?), we might think more generally about the implications of our spatial imaginaries and our terminology. In our own country and our own cultural moment, what kind of work is being accomplished with a designation like "homeland security"? What kind of logic of belonging and exclusion was installed with the word "homeland" in this case? One senses how importantly our inquiry this semester branches out to our own modest migrant sensibilities, to our own understanding of ourselves as citizens of a national space.

I think our post-film discussion gave us some very useful leads to pursue, especially in that apparent tension between romanticized sub-communities and more responsible, nuanced gradations of migrancy and homelessness (something that Elizabeth brought up with her observations, I believe). The film's poignant rendering of the latter seems to me to be an important contribution to our inquiry this semester, even as it may in some respects cross over into the former. Here is James Clifford, from that important 1994 essay "Diasporas" (I hope you had a chance to look at the first 10-12 pages or so): "How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of displacement, of constructing homes away from home? What experiences do they reject, replace, or marginalize? ... What is the range of experiences covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition"? (302, 306). Caren Kaplan, in an essay that also would have been relevant in these final weeks, cautions us against homogenizing the terms and understandings of displacement and travel, fearing that we'll end up "masking the economic and social differences between kinds of displacement in a homogenized 'cosmopolitanism' and generalizing nostalgia through a celebration of the condition of exile" (102). Rushdie's fiction and his personal example have created a wonderfully rich and complicated test case for these questions and ideas (recall the questions we raised, for example, when we discussed Chamcha fleeing burning Brickhall for India).

(ibid. Between that last paragraph and this one I left to spend thirty minutes on the elliptical machine downstairs, and, listening to Iron Maiden on my iPod (ah, the things I admit to! Yes, lest you think from this class that I only listen to Ravi Shankar, Judy Garland, Nitin Sawhney, and Andrew Bird, now you know about this guilty pleasure left over from my heavy metal days of youth!), I just happened to hear the songs "Coming Home" and "Running Free" (the latter with such elevated lyrics as "I've got no place to call my own / Hit the gas, and here I go"). So our course, Rushdie, Okwe, Dorothy & Toto, et al., pursue me even when I'm working out. And that makes me think of other rock and roll links, such as Rushdie's friends U2, whose song "Walk On" offers this: "Home, hard to know what it is / If you never had one / Home, I can't say where it is / But I know I'm going / Home, that's where the heart is.")

Anyway, where was I?! Do you have any other thoughts about/reactions to the film?? The connections with our readings and contexts are legion, aren't they? These "nobodies" circulating furtively and invisibly in a remapped London (another palimpsest? remember the Under World beneath the Over World in Abraham's Bombay in The Moor's Lsst Sigh?) remind me not only of Bhabha's "gatherings" in the "Dissemination" essay, but also of those "maybe thirty human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent" (273) that Chamcha sees through a crack in the door in the Shaandaar -- lives in deferral, spectral individuals who can't even be migrants yet, much less citizens. The emphasis on doors, stairs, elevators, hidden entryways, etc., was appropriate, too, as was the fact that this was a very kinetic film: the characters were always on the move, it seemed, flowing from one frame and location to the next (and, in the case of Okwe and Senay, never sleeping). Back to Bhabha, I can't help but cite again that quote I had on the board all those weeks ago: "We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the 'beyond': an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà - here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth."

Baudrillardian Bits

We reconvene tomorrow night, of course, for our penultimate meeting, and our viewing of Stephen Frears captivating 2003 film, Dirty Pretty Things. The film may most evidently connect with the contemporary London sections of The Satanic Verses, but I think you'll find that it is richly conversant with our conversations about issues of migrancy, the reach of the past, imaginary homelands, the "gatherings" of Bhabha, the rhetoric of the streets and pedestrianism, global citizenship and imagined communities, etc.

I hope your thoughts about your final papers are developing productively apace. I just had a couple more mini-insights/possible leads (as I imagine writing a similar paper -- and, indeed, I keep threatening myself that I'll try to write an article soon), which don't necessarily go anywhere yet but which may be suggestive nonetheless: during one of the characterizations of the cracked, banal state of "stock-owning Mall America," the narrator of Fury indicates that "among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute" (115). When, two pages later, we read that "such was the life of the young in the America of the incipient third millennium" (117), I perked up and thought, "Oh, that's almost the Midnight's Children idea in a new setting, context: i.e., the one novel is about the children of independence in India, and the other is about the children of the third millennium. Both combine propitiousness and peril. One sees clearly in a simple example like this how Rushdie's mind and thoughts have traveled across two decades as a novelist. As we move into tomorrow night's film and continue to think about notions of global citizenship (and the corresponding ethical orientation that accompanies the new forms of citizenship and (un)belonging), I also remain intrigued by how Rushdie has moved (in The Moor's Last Sigh and Fury) to a more critical stance vis-a-vis hybridity. I'm still thinking about that 2-3 page description of the Spanish town of Benegeli in TMLS, and specifically about the hollowness of the town's multiculturalism/hybridity; it seems to anticipate the discourse of the simulacrum in Fury in that it's a kind of fake/simulated hybridity. There's no serious, community-building essence to the diversity on the Street of Parasites. It reminds me a little bit of Malik's disgust and astonishment as he is forced to listen to pedestrians conduct intimate conversations on their cell phones for all the world to hear.

Which brings me to Baudrillard and the title of this posting. Many of you have probably read excerpts from his provocative little book Simulations (I passed out a handout in class last time about Disneyworld: his argument there is that having places like Disneyworld leads us (falsely) to believe that there are imaginary/simulated spaces (e.g., Disneyworld) and "real" spaces (e.g., the world outside of Disneyworld), when in fact even that so-called "real" world is now hopelessly gone amidst the barrage of images, signs, media blitzes, etc.). Baudrillard elsewhere proposes (in a passage I read to you last week,and, again, think of Fury in this context) that "today it is quotidian reality in its entirety--political, social, historical, and economic--that from now incorporates the simulatory dimension of hyperrealism" and that, consequently, "art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image." Maybe these ideas help us to perceive and assess the accomplishment of a novel like Fury (especially combined with how presciently the novel diagnoses the Baudrillardian/postmodern condition and connects this condition with what will happen on 9/11).

I'll reproduce it here (since I can't recall if maybe it was covered by the screen after I wrote it on the whiteboard last week), but the following is a useful way of contextualizing/mapping all of this. According to Baudrillard, there are four basic historic phases of the sign (recall from your past encounters with theory and structural linguistics that a sign is composed of any signifier and signified): (1) There is a truth, a basic reality that is faithfully represented (by a sign, by language, etc.); (2) This truth/reality still exists, but it is distorted, warped, or perverted through representation; (3) This truth/reality has gone, though we still try to cling to it by masking its disappearance through representation; (4) There is no relationship between the sign and reality, because there is no longer anything to to reflect. Western society, according to Baudrillard, has now entered this 4th stage and is unambiguously in the age of simulation. Fury might then be asking if there can be any degree of recovery. And does/can this help us work through some of the vexing questions about gender and sexuality with which we struggled last week? That is, via Baudrillard's logic, normal sexual desire is no longer a personal response to a person we meet and engage: instead, it's created and stimulated by images of beauty and desire with which the media bombards us.

Still Thinking Furiously

Hello again, all. Another posting from a Rushdie "webspyder." I must say that I feel quite stirred up about Fury after our discussion this past Wednesday; I'm also eager to see it continue, so, if you're at all inclined, join me here! First of all, a tidbit or two from Sassen, if only so we get her article into the conversation in some way. How about this for a line that could centralize an argument for an extended paper on Rushdie: "Replete with such regulatory fractures, global cities include dense and complex borderlands marked by the intersection of multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders" (221) (there are some echoes of Bhabha in there, too, right??). Later, Sassen proposes that "insofar as much of this activity happens in cities...much new critical and analytic effort is directed at the city....Borderzones have become the sites of analytic interest and complexity" (222). It seems that Rushdie's Bombay, London, and New York could be brought together profitably around the suggestions and possibilities of quotes such as these. His novels do nothing if not assess the new approaches to questions of national cultures and identities, and the new epistemological logic of "living here, belonging elsewhere." I also think back to our discussion of Chamcha's flight from London after everything goes haywire in The Satanic Verses: Rushdie seems so good at diagnosing the ills of globalization (via marginalized and/or working class characters; see, too, those crucial 184-187 pages in The Moor's Last Sigh, which tell us how urgent is the imperative that we theorize globalization carefully, which was part of my rationale for assigning Sassen), but when it comes right down to it the mode of response seems to be flight rather than the construction of a local politics. It's an interesting issue and problem with which to grapple.

Regarding this past Tuesday night, I now see what you all were up to. Everyone ate just the right amount of jelly bellies such that when Kaylen sent me home with the remainder the jar was poised for maximum sonic noticeability as I walked down the sidewalks to my car. It was as if you wanted to put me in the position of Malik on his bouncy castle. Ah, but we decided that we needn't interpret the ending in terms of infantilization, right?! Do others want to weigh in on Malik's return to Asmaan? Overly sentimental? Pathetic? Is Solanka merely infantilizing himself here, or does it recall the ending of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and thus become somehow right, somehow consistent with fairy stories and Tolkien's idea of "eucatastrophe"? "Read and bring me home to you" implores the epigraph of Haroun. Simple yet poignant stuff, and somehow it's echoed (for me) at the end of Fury. There's real emotion here and we might appreciate the sense of closure for a change (since we don't usually get it in Rushdie's novels), even though Malik's condition as he wanders "Asmaan's Heath" still seems exilic. This ending offers the antidote, perhaps, to life in the simulacrum, life in an unsettled, postmodern world: to quote the title of a novel we're not reading, salvation is to be found in the ground beneath your feet (even if you're carrying a noisy bucket of jelly beans).

I handed out the Yeats poem the other night not only because it's invoked in Fury (what isn't invoked in this novel, right?!), but also because I like the way Fury becomes kind of a turn-of-the-century bookend to Yeats's early-century warning about the (violent? apocalyptic?) culmination of "twenty centuries of stony sleep." Each is concerned with the best lacking all conviction and with the fear of what "rough beast" might be slouching towards Bethlehem. 9/11 has only made this a more startling comparison. I think I saw the novel less as a critique of America, per se (at least along the lines of what could have been "those nasty cultural imperialists" et al.), than as a sobering critique of postmodern/American banality, where the simulated and the real are almost indistinguishable (Ted was speaking persuasively to this the other night). That doesn't strike me as cliched, even though we've seen films like The Matrix and read William Gibson's fiction, etc. Zygmunt Bauman refers to "the consuming desire of consuming," and it seems Rushdie's novel can/will indeed ultimately serve (again to use Ted's phrase) as a kind of time capsule related to that notion. I've been thinking more, too, about all those pop culture references and "lists": is it the case that this novel will not age well because of them, or might the opposite be true? That is, will the point about the banality of this part of postmodern life become even more striking when readers no longer can smile knowingly and recognize the references? Maybe some particularly resourceful reader of the future will still be able to track the reference to "sly-eyed lady of the fenlands" here so as to enjoy some poetry Dylan-style.

I was also interested in that part of the conversation that wondered if this novel should provide more of a localized description and experience of New York. Part of me is inclined to think this novel could no more be Let the Great World Spin in that regard than The Matrix could be a Woody Allen film. Still, this issue gets even more interesting when we consider the cover image, with that hovering cloud over the Empire State Building. Talk about adding an uncanny element to the novel's reception (post-9/11).

Could it be that this novel is interrogating and undermining one of Rushdie's most treasured elsewheres, destinations, imagined homelands: Oz? Fury tells us that Oz is sometimes a land of "half truths." There's a paper in there somewhere, too (one that might include Benengeli vs. Erasmo in The Moor's Last Sigh, the ruby slippers, the vacuousness of "Dream-America" in Fury, the wandering, can't-go-home-again Malik, etc.). Rushdie's gathering body of palimpsests are really quite extraordinary across the full trajectory of his work.

I could also see someone pursuing a comparison between the sea of stories and Solanka's hypertext tale-telling as companion and mutually-enriching metaphors. The digressiveness and endless possibilities of The Thousand and One Nights could come into play here, too. At their best, these various venues for stories suggest fluid mergings, recombinations, multiple pathways, nomadic stories (ah, there's also the Moor nailing his "last sigh" of a story to all those various doors) -- whether it's the oral tradition, the novel, or hypertext/cyberspace, the power of stories transfers to each new medium with confidence and verve. And we subsequently learn the use of stories that "aren't even true."

Well, there's a start, a 31st jar for Fury! And I already sense I'll be back with more ...

From "Fundo Stuff" to Furia

Greetings, yet again! It seems a bit strange to say/realize this, but tomorrow night's class represents a culmination of sorts, a kind of invocation of "khattam-shud" before the real khattam-shud of the semester. Tomorrow represents the last spittoon in which to catch the commentary of a reading-intensive week, the last real class discussion. From there, we'll of course have the second film (Frears's Dirty Pretty Things) to look forward to, and then the various odds & ends that come with the final class meeting on 5/1. You'll want to bring a lateral-minded, longitudinal, capacious, recapitulatory type sensibility to our final conversations, especially since it's this approach that will launch you on your final writing projects for the course. To that end, in terms of tomorrow night, we should be prepared to consider Fury on its own terms (with all of its oddities and eccentricities!) and in the context of the various novels and critical pieces that we've read. What kind of conversation can we create between Fury and The Moor's Last Sigh? Between Fury and Haroun and the Sea of Stories? Between Fury and The Satanic Verses? And we'll also, of course, have the Saskia Sassen essay to fold into the ongoing conversation, as well.

And surely there are some remainders, some thoughts still in the queue from The Moor's Last Sigh? I'm suddenly thinking (as I continue to ruminate on the novel's haunting conclusion and on our brief conversation about Barthes' "The Death of the Author") about incarceration and the writer, and specifically the way Rushdie so wonderfully brings together the Moor's story, Rushdie's personal experience with the fatwa, and the incarceration of Cervantes (which is said to have led to the inspiration for and creation of Don Quixote). I'm also thinking there might be some nice comparative possibilities as we consider the Moor's enlistment in Mainduck's "fight club" in the context of Saleem's Buddha/CUTIA experience in Midnight's Children: in the latter it's Islamic extremism/purity that is interrogated, and in the former it's Hindu extremism ("the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one" (305)). I'm also remembering that wonderful example of cultural hybridity early in the novel when the Catholic nativity scene gets cross-fertilized with an Eastern experience: the holy family goes native, you might say, and a solidly Western/European tradition gets hybridized and amalgamated (see pages 62-3).

And on another note, perhaps one/some of you might be inclined to start a thread relating to final paper ideas? We could all seek to comment, to offer suggestions, to share our own ideas about this paper within that thread ... Just an idea! If nothing else, each of you will have at least a few minutes to preview your inquiry when we meet on that last night ...

"Not with a bang but a whimper": Thoughts on the ending of TMLS

So, I've been thinking about last night's discussion, particularly the comments I made regarding the ending and I want to expand and clarify to a certain extent. I broached that the ending was less than satisfying or at least raises more questions than it settles. I don't mean to say that everything should be tied up nicely or that there should be that happy ending instead of ending with Moor waiting for that happily ever after, but rather I just felt that there was something happening with the ending in its oddity. After thinking on it for a while, I've come up with the idea that the dissatisfaction with the conclusion of the Moor's story is intended by Rushdie. Through the use of point-of-view narration, the audience has sutured itself onto the character of the moor. So when we reach the end, as moor looks for a place to lie down and sleep, waiting for a better time when things aren't so crazy, we are included in this action- or this final act of passivity. In this way, Moor's cowardice is an indictment of the audience and of contemporary society at large for their complacency in the face of fundamentalism, terrorism and gross injustice in the world. In The Satanic Verses, the satirist Baal insists that his work is "to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep." In raising the larger issues, fundamentalism, fanaticism, national identity, capitalism, etc. Rushdie is working to rouse us from our slumber and inspire conversation on these topics. Coming from this angle, the lackluster ending takes on new meaning and deeper resonance. I don't know- just a thought.

Late but....

I know this is very late notice for anything involving The Moor's Last Sigh, but I hope you find this link helpful and/or interesting.  I love finding sources in texts and following the trails of inspiration and creative theft that authors leave for us. I think this interest of mine comes from my Medieval studies background, and I find that it trickles over into my study of more recent and contemporary authors as well.  - catie

A Hammer and Some Nails

Those are the crucial implements for Moor as he sets off to leave his story "nailed to the landscape in my wake" (433). Rushdie will begin his own such endeavor -- in a slightly modernized way, beginning with a Facebook posting and this teaser on his website -- in the coming months with the appearance of his new book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir. The publication date is September 12, it's listed as being 656 pages (!), and you can get a first look at the cover here ...

See you tonight!