Rewriting the Political, Social and Cultural History of India, England and America by Rewriting the History of the Novel in Salman Rushdie's Quichotte (original) (raw)
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FROM PROTO-NOVEL TO POST-NOVEL: SALMAN RUSHDIE’S QUICHOTTE AS THE REWRITING OF DON QUIXOTE
Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 2024
Salman Rushdie’s 2019 novel Quichotte is the story of a hero reimagined by Rushdie as a 21st century version of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel opens in contemporary America where the 70-year-old protagonist Ismail Smile, who goes mad by watching TV, works as a travelling salesman for a pharmaceutical company called Smile Pharmaceuticals. The plot focuses on Ismail’s love for a famous television personality Miss Salma R. who, like Ismail, comes from India. He gets retired, changes his name to Quichotte and goes on a quest to win Salma’s love. The quest turns into a complete replica of Cervantes’s Don Quixote when, on a shooting star, he wishes that he had a son who suddenly appears in the passenger seat of the car he drives. He names him Sancho. Yet, the narration turns out to be a novel in the novel written by a spy novelist referred to only as Brother. Quichotte, therefore, becomes Brother’s imagination that recreates the classical Don Quixote in a contemporary setting. This paper, then, focuses on the concept of post-truth in the metanarrative of Salman Rushdie who not only rewrites a classical novel but also raises questions as to whether or not truths and narrators are reliable. This study also analyses the saturation of the manipulating power of post-truth era in the lives of Rushdie’s characters.
The focus of the present paper is three dimensional. In the beginning, it critically establishes the foregrounded textual features in the well-known novels of Salman Rushdie which projects him as a unique postmodern fiction writer so far. Then, attention shifts to the in-depth analysis of Quichotte which is a 2019 novel by him written getting motivated by Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel Don Quixote, and it tells the story of an addled Indian American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become preoccupied. The protagonist, Sam Du Champ, who is an Indian-born writer living in America and author of a number of unsuccessful spy thrillers writes a book as an bizarre attempt creating the character of Ismail Smile. Then, through a postmodern analysis of the contexts, conventions, intertextuality, language features, metalanguage, modes, and readerly perspective of the narrative, it examines how the narrative discourse addresses the reader; incorporates a story within a story; uses various techniques that emphasize the story's status as a fictional enterprise keeping the reader more engaged; departs from conventional ideas in terms of the form and function of a narrative; and makes the reader draw his or her own conclusions; and thus challenges the assumptions as a metafiction.
Travelling with Quichotte: Reading Rushdie’s Quixotic Reinvention of Cervantes’ Don
RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism
Salman Rushdies latest novel Quichotte , inspired by Cervantes Don Quixote , revolves around the journey of a fictional character named Ismail Smile who adopts the name Quichotte as he embarks on a fantastic quest across America to win the heart of celebrated actor and talk-show host Salma R, since his perception of reality has been muddled by incessant immersion in television shows, just as the mind of Cervantes don had been addled by his preoccupation with chivalric romances. While Cervantes protagonist, through his various misadventures, ironically exposed the many maladies of contemporary society, Quichottes journey across America, accompanied by his son Sancho, whom he miraculously imagines into existence, also operates as a picaresque narrative that methodically dissects the alarming aberrations of contemporary world order. Taking Quixotes inability to distinguish between the real and the fictional as his starting point, Rushdies text eclectically foregrounds the menacing fiss...
Salman Rushdie in the Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values
2014
The aim of this study is to prove that Rushdie's recent novels are not postcolonial in the sense that they abandon the colonial/colonized binary, the embrace of hybridity, and the theme of undermining the coercion and domination of the colonial country assumed in postcolonial discourse. Instead, his recent fiction is labeled postmodern because it is filled with exuberant postmodern techniques such as historiographic metafiction, the hegemony of mode of productions, the postmodern fragmented self, and suspicions of grand narrative. Furthermore, I will argue that there is an association between Rushdie's postmodern narrative technique (his mixing of history and fantasy) and his political stance when it comes to his notion about America, and that postmodernism enables Rushdie to question the historical "truth" and allows him to rewrite or reconstruct South Asia's history which then sets in motion the western discourse of hegemony. Contrary to commonplace commentaries about his anti-colonialist stance, Rushdie's historical and fictional narrative not only assures the hegemonic discourse of late capitalism but also reflects an imperialist political stance. This will be demonstrated by considering Rushdie's manipulation in his novels of alternate history, cultural modes of production such as commodity fetishism and media, postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism, and historiographic metafiction; furthermore, these features of postmodernism which Rushdie uses in his recent novels indicate his position as a postmodern writer.
The Transnationalism of Salman Rushdie: From a Contrapuntal to a Metamorphic Reading of History
2017
One of the possible ways to conceptualize transnationalism is to analyze the special kind of consciousness it has given birth to, marked by dual or multiple identifications. A post-colonial writer concerned with what it means to be a migrant or diasporic subject, Salman Rushdie starts from what Said has called a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of history, the setting against one another of home and host country in The Satanic Verses, where the fall from the sky of both Gibreel and Saleem embody “the unhealable rift . . . between the self and its true home” (Said). However, in his subsequent novels, the contrapuntal reading makes way for a plural and metamorphic reading of history. The initial awareness of the split self changes into an awareness of the irreducible plurality of the self’s identifications with the multiple histories of the spaces and times it inhabits. Thus in his following novels Rushdie gravitates towards a new understanding of the migrant’s identity as metamorphic, constant...
International Journal of English Literature and Culture, 2015
The paper explores postmodern playfulness and blurring of boundaries visa -vis postcolonial rewriting history in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground beneath Her Feet. It shows the impossibility of locating the cultural network and social picture of "Mother India" for a stable nation and unified identity in colonial and postcolonial histories. It explores the residual effect of colonial domination and the transnational setting in the wide frame of Western and postcolonial culture, through abundant references to Greek mythology, European philosophy, contemporary texts, and at the same time mixes them with four decades' history of the growth of rock music and the stars of rock 'n' roll producing the effect of "kitsch". The paper also emphasizes the juxtaposition of personal and national narratives in the novels to expose the traumas underlying postcolonial Indian identities, the lasting influence of British culture, and the inaccessibility of a purely "Indian" past. Finally, it focuses on the significance of the postmodern devices like unreliable narrator, metafiction, pastiche, etc. in construction of the national history of India which is repressed in colonial violence.
‘Worlds in Collision’: Salman Rushdie, Globalisation, and Postcoloniality-in-Crisis
The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives , 2020
Pre-publication draft of a chapter from 'The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives' (2020). This chapter maps a transition from the postcolonial disenchantment of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), to the global-American style of The Ground Beneath her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001), and their cosmopolitan mythologizing, geopolitical allegories, and account of American hegemony. It initially examines how The Moor’s Last Sigh rejects the exuberant postcolonial magic realism that characterised Rushdie’s earlier works in favour of a disenchanted realism that focuses on the insufficiency of art to represent Bombay’s globalised criminal capitalism. The section on The Ground Beneath her Feet argues that its deterritorialised rock music mythology embodies the fractures, or irreconcilabilities, of cosmopolitan abstractions of identity and form. The final section on Fury concludes the argument by examining how it operates as a form of fin de siècle ‘world-systemic’ literature that foregrounds the ‘autumnal’ decline of American hegemony through a hyperrealist aesthetics of literary compression and excessive violence.
Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and the Post-truth Condition
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
The emergence of ‘post-truth’ has dramatically affected the contemporary socio-political discourses. The blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction has become ostensible owing to the proliferation of social media and the pivotal role played by cyberspaces in creating volatile identities. The erosion of objectivity and the creation of a Baudrillardian ‘hyperreality’ have destabilized the position of truth irrevocably. The meteoric rise of far-right populist governments across the world with their jingoistic, xenophobic and parochial brand of politics, the erasure of subjective autonomy and invasion of privacy have pushed the world to the brink of moral anarchy, devoid of ethical values and veracity. Salman Rushdie’s latest work Quichotte (2019) is a postmodern rendering of Miguel De Cervantes’ picaresque novel Don Quixote. This paper attempts to critically analyse the novel vis-à-vis the ‘post-truth condition’. The evolution of the concept of truth is traced through the id...
THE AGONIES AND ECSTASIES OF DIASPORA IN RUSHDIE'S FICTION
IRJHIS, 2023
is one of the most prominent and significant diasporic writers of the 20th century. Born in India in 1947, Rushdie migrated to England in 1961, where he spent most of his career as a writer. His works have been hailed for their inventive and imaginative style, their blending of cultures and nationalities, and their exploration of issues of belonging, identity, and language. In this paper, it will be stressed that Rushdie's importance as a diasporic writer stems from his ability to shed light on the complexities and dilemmas of the diasporic experience, his use of language to create hybrid identities and his contribution to postcolonial literature. Salman Rushdie's importance as a diasporic writer stems from his ability to explore the complexities and dilemmas of the diasporic experience, his use of language to create hybrid identities, and his contribution to postcolonial literature. His works have been critical in shaping our understanding of diasporic cultures and identities, and his writing continues to be a vital and influential voice in the field of contemporary literature.