Realism beyond representation: Morrison, Ben Jelloun, Rushdie and the subject of freedom

This dissertation argues that the novels of Toni Morrison, Tahar ben Jelloun and Salman Rushdie are neither realist nor anti-realist, nor can they be accurately defined as magical realist. They are better understood as attempts to reimagine the possibilities for realism in a post-representational age, a phenomenon I call realism beyond representation. While they clearly destabilize nations of natural identity at both the biological and cultural levels, and display a deep irreverence for normative narrative strategies and assumptions about reality, they do not resort to the opposite extreme and assume a stance of absolute undecidability or ceaseless deferral of meaning. They retain an investment in the possibility of transforming objective reality. Yet, unlike realist or magical realist texts, the path they forge toward this reality passes through the subject. Rather than appealing to existing racial, ethnic, gendered, national, or class-based identity categories, however, they attempt to create communities of readers whose identifications are based not on identity but on a shared interest in taking up the project of enlightenment (human freedom) without replicating its travesties. All three novelists depict love, in some form or another, as a model for the kind of mutual recognition that characterizes the relationship with the reader they attempt to make possible. Yet these are not merely romantic appeals to sensibility or feeling. Rather, Morrison's historical focus on the psychic and epistemic effects of slavery provides the basis for her call for love without possession. Ben Jelloun's attention to love without repudiation of the feminine is both drawn from and throws into sharp relief the oppressive dynamics underlying the Moroccan nationalist "family romance." Rushdie's commitment to love that is greater than what defeats it reflects his investment in the "dream" of a secular, democratic India that persists despite the disappointing historical realities of contemporary Indian nationalism. The genre of nonrepresentational realism demands in the relation between reality, text, and reader a simultaneous "inwardness toward the other" and outwardness toward the world that these novelists suggest may be our best hope for subverting the Hegelian master/slave dialectic in which enslavement provides the only pathway to self-conscious "freedom."...