Perilous adventures: Imagining the eschatological unity of local and global. Metaphorical and metonymical modes of interpretation in Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' and Wilson Harris's 'The Guyana Quartet'

The purpose of this study will be to understand the relation between the global and the local in terms of the relation between (what I will be calling) metaphorical and metonymical modes of interpretation. I will demonstrate the manner in which the interdependence of the metaphorical mode (as it is developed by Wilson Harris's narrator-protagonist in The Guyana Quartet) with the metonymical mode (as it is developed by Salman Rushdie's narrator-protagonist in Midnight's Children ), provides us with a way of understanding the interdependent relation of the local and the global. The purpose of this study, then, is to (re)explore the relation between the local and the global through the perspectives afforded us by the narrator-protagonists of Harris's and Rushdie's novels.; I will deploy the interpretative stances that we find in these novels as reading strategies in my examination of selected critical pieces by four of the most influential theorists of the relation between the local and the global within the context of colonial history and (neo)imperialism: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha. The basis of this comparison will be these writers' attempts to construct "authentic" modes of representing their local circumstances and strategies to a global audience. In order to enable this comparison, then, I will briefly look at the concept and practice of representational authenticity as it pertains to cross-cultural writing and encounter.; My study concludes that, by apprehending the relations between the local and the global, as they are articulated by these writers, according to the relations between the metonymical and metaphorical interpretative stances that we find operative within Midnight's Children and The Guyana Quartet, we can understand the relation of the local to the global in precisely the same manner as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur understands "the search for truth": as the site of an unending, dynamic, processional and necessarily interdependent relation between the logic of equivalence---within which an order of global similarity is able to negotiate local difference---and the logic of contiguity---within which local differences resist any illusory form of global similarity. It will be my final contention that this relation is eschatological, insofar as it is resolvable only beyond the limits, or at the imagined end of human time and experience.