The Magic Narrative Of Rushdie's Novels And The Construction Of India Cultural Image

There is always ample tension of interpretation for Salman Rushdie's novels,which are subtly rooted in Indian multicultural milieu,his personal experience as an immigrant and his postcolonial global reflections.Considerable critic attention has been paid to his strategy of magic realism by working Indian features,culture and history into his narratives.This research applies close reading to Rushdie's major novels to reveal his imaginary world where he plays his magic cube games by breaking the linear time of presence,past and future and removing the boundaries between Britain and India,the real and the magic,likeness and difference.Chapter One begins with analyzing and summarizing Rushdie's narrative strategies of magic realism.Then Lacan's theory of "three orders" is employed to look into the phenomenon of "entwining orders" in Rushdie's narrative,the imaginary,the symbolic and the real tangling and interweaving to shape his unique "literary India"through "transforming" and "reflecting".Chapter Two unfolds a further study of Rushdie's narrative strategies from the perspectives of time and space.In Rushdie's novels,time could expand or contract,rejecting the attribute of linearity in cognition.His space could be dual-natured or even triple-natured,material and spiritual,Indian and British at the same time,or with his perception of religion,races,and nations forming a "Utopian Space.”Rushdie's magic realism always maintains a sense of critical awareness,deconstructing the truth of history and removing the mask of its grand narrative.Being steeped in the Western culture,Rushdie offers his literary interpretation of contemporary religious issues,namely,the Islamic crises,not only in The Satanic Verses,which brought about his 20 years of personal exile,but in his other novels in which he expresses his reflections on and expectations of religious tolerance and diversity.In the context of world civilization,he is advocating the co-existence of diverse religions to avoid ideological conflicts provoked by religious differences as well as condemning the obscurantist nature of some religions.Rushdie is also deeply concerned about racial conflicts and the fact that,within the arena of power,racial differences can easily escalate into crucial conflicts,and by reworking Indian historical events into his narrative,he attempts retrospective criticism.As "the father of postcolonial writing," Rushdie did not hold himself back from stances other than postcolonial criticism.The inevitability and contingency of those conflicts are also conveyed sometimes in an ironic tone.Chapter Three adopts the approach of cultural studies to unveil the cultural image of India in Rushdie's novels,structuring the logic framework of this study.Imbedded in Rushdie's literary texts are the mystery,diversity,and heterogeneity of Indian culture and its mirror-image relations with Britain in both modern and contemporary history.The literary techniques he employed to convey these features and construct the cultural image of India are explored to reveal his actualization of"going home" by writing.In Imaginary Homelands:Essays and Criticism,1981-1991,he earnestly confesses his writing of India,claiming that one could "go home"through constructing an imaginary home with a critical mechanism.His transcultural reflections enable him to look at Indian history,religions and culture from an angle other than consecrating them.Chapter Four focuses on Rushdie's construction of the motherland.On the basis of his cultural image of India,Rushdie's consciousness of identity and cultural understandings constitutes the major initiative in his construction of the motherland.From An imagological point of view,his magic realism and idea of cultural tolerance and diversity help in constructing the general cultural image of the motherland by way of mythological narrative,intertextuality and juxtaposition.So far,it is safe to conclude that Rushdie's construction of the cultural image of the motherland is both inspiring and revealing in that its implication indicates that the innate driving forces thereby are discourse powers and competition of powers,and it will be forever challenged by interpretation and reconstruction,the self and the other,trespassing imagination,etc..Rushdie has paved the way of constructing the image of the motherland through magic narrative.A study of his "entwining orders" finds that he aptly passes the barriers of transnational,transracial and transcultural awareness and creates dialogue in the sphere of form and meaning generation.