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Authorial Subjectivity in Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Quichotte

La subjectivité auctoriale dans Fury et Quichotte de Salman Rushdie
Trajanka Kortova Jovanovska

Résumés

Dans son œuvre abondante, Salman Rushdie met au premier plan la question de l’auctorialité au moyen de figures d’écrivains et d’auteurs qui contemplent la nature et l’objectif de leur métier, leur identité auctoriale et leur positionnement dans la société et l’histoire intellectuelle au travers de leur écriture. Cet article vise à explorer la subjectivité de l’auteur dans ses romans Fury et Quichotte. À l’opposé d’une représentation de l’auteur comme indélébilement marqué par son contexte national et historique, comme dans Midnight’s Children et The Moor’s Last Sigh, ou par une indétermination ambivalente qui exclut un ancrage final de l’identité, comme dans The Satanic Verses, dans ces deux romans le soi auctorial est formé exclusivement par rapport à ses créations dans leur « au-delà ». Fury et Quichotte présentent une image de l’auctorialité postcoloniale dans laquelle l’auteur postcolonial choisit l’espace ambivalent de l’exil ou promeut la fiction comme un aspect nécessaire du soi.

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‘Unselfing’ the Self: The Fury of Creation

1Along with The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury inaugurates a locational and ideological shift in Rushdie’s oeuvre—the postcolonial paradigm is abandoned for a cosmopolitan one, while the artist’s rootedness in a collective entity is replaced with a tragic individualism. Malik Solanka, the author-protagonist of this novel, is a lonely, isolated figure lost in the consumerist and superficial maelstrom of contemporary New York, whose predicament can be seen as an expression of Rushdie’s decentred and divided self after the fatwa. As he puts it, the demonised image his detractors created after the notoriety of The Satanic Verses has made him feel ‘as if I have been concealed behind a false self, as if a shadow has become substance while I have been relegated to the shadows’ (1992, 405). Malik Solanka epitomises this authorial split self; cut off from the moorings of nation, family and home, he is left with only art to validate his existence. Art here is not an alternative (hi)story as in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh, but the only world in which the author seeks to belong.

2Anshuman Mondal argues that this novel, ironically, is ‘as much written from the American centre as about it, as much a reinforcement of his own celebrity as an indictment of the culture that sustains it, as much an articulation of globalisation as a critique of it. The result is a chronic ambivalence’ (Mondal 173–174). Sarah Brouillette also reads Fury as a fictional exploration of Rushdie’s own status as a literary celebrity:

What needs to be acknowledged is that the book is not about Rushdie’s life, but about ‘Rushdie’ as brand name, as paratext, and as icon. . . . In Fury [contemporary political] movements . . . pose a direct challenge to the creative rights of one individual, who is granted a special power to manipulate both his own history and contemporary politics within his fictional works. For Malik, the subsequent reintegration of those narratives into the world produces an anxiety about the way the meaning they take on erases not just his intentions but also, as the novel’s frequent references to masks suggests, his very identity. (151)

3How authorial identity is shaped and destabilised in relation to the author’s creations is a crucial issue in Fury. The novel is a reflection of and on its author’s status as a literary celebrity; hence, its preoccupation with the consequences and the aftermath of literary creation, the author’s responsibility as an arbiter of ideas and public opinion, and the degree of independence his work can attain from its creator.

4The dominant Rushdiean themes of the self-invention and reconstruction of identity encoded in migration and national, cultural and epistemological nomadism are subdued in Fury, which reveals the ontological void of hybridity. The ontological richness of the author-protagonists of Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh, Saleem and Moraes, whose relational selves are productively re-constructed along multiple axes of identification, gives way to a significantly impoverished sense of self that is haunted by the ghosts of the past subsumed under an all-engulfing ‘fury.’ In Fury, the authorial subjectivity is (re-)constructed in its unstable interaction with its own artistic creations, which represent the agon that propels the dynamism of authorship. Through his most famous creations—the doll Little Brain and the cyborg Kronos—Malik explores different aspects of his self that ultimately lead nowhere as both creator and creation are engulfed in the world of (mis)appropriation and simulacra.

5According to Damian Grant, the quest towards which Malik Solanka is propelled is ‘for the discovery of the self, or rather for the ‘unselfing of the self’ (Fury 79), as Solanka seeks, through a painful process of confession and expiation, to recognise and admit to the kind of person he is, the forces that drive him, and the experiences which have made him so’ (Grant 152). Here, Rushdie explores the crisis of authorial subjectivity, as Malik’s desire to lose himself in the world of the simulacrum and empty consumerism of New York is directly triggered by the consequences of his artistic creation—the commercialisation of his doll Little Brain and the disassociation of his creation from its creator, which is therefore the ‘orphaned’ ‘text’ circulating globally without the guidance of its author-father in Socrates’ sense (Plato 70 and Derrida 429–450). Developing the theme from The Satanic Verses, Rushdie reconfigures an archetypal subtext—that of artistic creation as divine creation—in a modern setting: Malik fashions a creature out of clay which subsequently rebels against him, treads on the principles he instilled in it and starts a new life independent of its creator, while ineluctably remaining tied to him with elastic bonds.

6The position from which Malik ‘speaks’ in this novel is radically different from the identitary palimpsest that defined Saleem/India, Moraes/Boabdil, the conjoined selves of Gibreel and Saladin or the satanically diversified Author-God. The cosmopolitan authorial sensibility here is manifested in the rootless, rudderless and purposeless character of Malik becoming gradually ‘unselfed’ in a society of simulacra and uncontrolled consumerism. His American ‘unselfing’ is presented in terms alluding to consumption (‘America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured’ [Fury 69]), renaming (‘Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike’), loss of memory (‘Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing’), loss of language (‘I’ll rip my lying mother tongue out of my throat and speak your broken English instead’), and technologization (‘Scan me, digitise me, beam me up’ [Fury 51]).

7The force that threatens to unmake him is an ontologically destabilising ‘fury’ that dominates both him and his surroundings and that is represented as a generalised state of mind of modernity. As Vassilena Parashkevova puts it,

[a]s a metaphor, fury is strongly reminiscent of shame in Rushdie’s early novel of the same title in that both ‘conditions’ are at once the cause and effect of themselves, feeding off themselves and gaining in potency until they reach epidemic proportions . . . Fury engages in tracing the ways in which specific genealogies and trajectories of fury—American as well as postcolonial, post-communist, nationalist, ethnic or indigenous, crisscross, overlap and inform each other. (158)

8Fury becomes Malik’s own personal demon, a paranoid anxiety exacerbated by the loss of Little Brain that manifests itself in outbursts of expletives, violent behaviour, loss of consciousness induced by drink, blackouts, etc. In a twist of the Frankenstein theme, Rushdie explores the consequences of the break-up of the creationary bond between creator-creature for the creator himself, who becomes a monster to his own Frankenstein, unable to imagine a life without his creation and, deprived of it, sinks into a life of emptiness and, so he fears, murderous destruction. Estranged from himself, becoming his own Other, he seeks integration in love and temporarily finds it, first in Mila and then in Neela, who both provide a healthy focus for his artistic creativity (Mila gives him a new artistic project and Neela a political one). However, the invocation of the mythical avenging goddesses as the presiding spirit of the modern age cannot help but render femininity, as Malik conceives it, a dark, inscrutable force that threatens the male ego with destruction.

9The mythic subtext of the Furies and their transformation from blood-thirsty avenging goddesses into the tamed Eumenides evokes Aeschylus’s play of the same name. It dramatises the drastic shift from a matriarchal to a patriarchal culture, which marks a corresponding ethical shift from a violent, blood-thirsty, barbaric age to an enlightened era of reason and moderation, in which language can persuade, assuage, excuse, and relativise what has so far been inexcusable and absolute (Aeschylus).

10The modern era of divided and imploding societies and disintegrated families and collective forms of belonging seems to be the ideal milieu for quenching the Furies’ avenging thirst—‘from New York to Lilliput-Blefuscu there was no escape from the beating of their wings’ (Fury 251). However, Malik’s obsessive preoccupation with the Furies turns out to be not so much the chaos of modern life as the split in his psyche caused by the loss of his creation, Little Brain: his dark, furious self emerges for the first time when, after his wife got rid of every trace of his doll from their home, he catches himself, in a clearly disassociated state of mind, standing above his sleeping wife and son with a knife in his hand. Moreover, the doll represents both a product and an aspect of Malik’s self.

11On one level, the motif of the fury functions as a variation of the classical concept of the Muse and both Mila and Neela as incarnations of the creative feminine principle orient Malik’s creative potential, which he compares to having ‘the divine afflatus: the breath of life’ (Fury 138). However, the dominant image of the Furies in the novel is that of avenging goddesses bent on punishing the transgressions of Malik’s artistic imagination—a modern-day Orestes, he is their predestined victim for turning not against his mother but against his artistic progeny. As Malik’s creations—first Little Brain, then the puppet kings—become outlaws repudiating the Law of the Father-Creator, what he perceives as their transgressions, flaws and debasement represent a reflection of his own.

12Malik creates the doll Little Brain as a ‘questing knowledge-seeker,’ interrogator of the ‘Great Minds’ philosopher-dolls, who in her insouciance and arrogant fearlessness resembles her godlike creator (as he admits, at one point Malik starts making his dolls out of clay in an act of imitatio Dei). Thus, in accordance with her modern-day taboo-breaking sensibility, she reproaches the doll of Galileo Galilei for submitting to the power of the Church and retracting his theory, confidently claiming that she would have burned the Vatican down. Paradoxically, Malik bolsters his self-image as a godlike creator by asserting the ontological supremacy of his (and god’s) creation: ‘Clay, of which God, who didn’t exist, made man, who did. Such was the paradox of human life: its creator was fictional, but life itself was a fact’ (Fury 95). As a result, Little Brain’s gradual growth from a doll, a puppet, an animated cartoon into a full-fledged public personality marks her ontological transformation from a creation into an individual in her own right, while her creator’s identity takes the downward trajectory from an authoritative Creator/God/Father to an anonymous puppet-master who no longer pulls the strings and who, in the end, evaporates from her life as an anachronistic fiction:

This creature of his own imagining, born of his best self and purest endeavor, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred. His original and now obliterated Little Brain had been genuinely smart, able to hold her own with Erasmus or Schopenhauer. . . . This revised edition, over which he had long ago lost creative control, had the intellect of a slightly over-average chimpanzee. (Fury 98)

13However, in deploring the mass media misappropriation of his own creation, Malik is blind to the fact that Little Brain’s renegade progress is encoded in the very nature of his own authorship. Although initially envisioned as a counter-voice calling to accountability the great philosophers of human history, she becomes subsumed by the cultural industry and rendered its epitome, just as Malik’s anti-establishmentarian credentials become eroded by his continuing to reap the profits of Little Brain’s commercial success.

14If Malik’s first larger-than-life creation, Little Brain, represents his split subjectivity, his second, the cyberneticist Akasz Kronos, doubles it. Created as his doppelganger, Kronos bears Malik’s exact physical resemblance: ‘a man with a full head of long silver hair framing a soft, round, surprisingly boyish face dominated by a wine-dark Cupid’s bow of a mouth’ (Fury 162). Through the story of Kronos and the usurpation of his identity by his creation, the Dollmaker, Malik reproduces the motif of a creation turned against its creator, which multiplies the chain of the creative process. Thus, we have the writer Rushdie and his fictional alter ego Malik, whose creation Little Brain turns against him; then, Malik creates Kronos after himself, who in turn creates the Dollmaker (an occupation that refers to Malik) and other cyborgs modelled after people from Malik’s reality. The religious and mythical matrix encoded in the act of creation forms the framework within which the creator-creation dynamic is to be played out: the creator creates his creations after his own image, but leaves them a certain degree of ontological freedom, as a consequence of which their meaningful potential is not reducible to what the creator instilled in them. Rather, they are largely free to transcend his ‘authorial intention’ and become their own makers; however, this freedom is inevitably revealed to be the flaw in the creator’s plan/providence, for, in their desire to assert themselves and their free agency, the creations turn against their creator, either in an open confrontation (as Satan’s and the other fallen angels’ rebellion against God, the Dollmaker’s revolution against Kronos, the monster’s murderous spree against Frankenstein’s family, the Olympian gods’ war against the Titans, etc.) or, more importantly, by reducing his ontological status and making him nothing more than a fiction (like Man’s treatment of God and, to an extent, Little Brain’s of Malik).

15Malik’s name for his creation, Kronos, evokes the divine ruler from the race of the Titans who, having rebelled against his father Uranus and usurped his place, is in turn displaced by his own progeny, the future Olympian gods, led by Zeus. The myth envelops Kronos’s fatherhood and divinity in the negative framework of infanticide and cannibalism, which, in turn necessitates rebellion and parricide. As in his dual identity as God and Father he conflates the two aspects of the creative potential, Cronos/Cronus/Kronos can also be read as Chronos, or ‘“Father Time” with his relentless sickle’ (Graves 38) who ends up consuming what he has created and as the ultimate artist, creator and ruler of a separate, fictional world. The relation creator-creation is, according to this mythical paradigm, that of mutual dis-membering and re-membering, or, as the creator is also a father to his creation/child, infanticide and parricide—images of extreme violence that metaphorically describe the intensity (or, as Malik would have it, the ‘fury’) of bringing a new world into being.

16In Malik’s case, biological and textual fatherhood sit uneasily with each other: for the first time in Rushdie’s fiction (except for his children’s books), his author-protagonist is a father, but, like Kronos, he metaphorically devours his child in order to clear the space for his artistic child, Little Brain. The son is an absent and barely remembered figure, while Little Brain and later the new character Kronos dominate the novel. Interestingly, Malik compares himself to Kronos not when he sidelines his son, but when his wife removes Little Brain from their home. Unable to separate himself from her, he subconsciously contemplates his wife’s and child’s murder, finds his doll and carries her, torn and ragged, with him to America. The animosity he feels towards his family, whom he promptly abandons as soon as he loses Little Brain, is rooted in his pathological desire to remain forever in the primal scene of creation wherein only creator and creation exist and when they first become aware of each other, each seeking validation from the Other. His obsession with his doll is satisfied when New York offers him the possibility to isolate himself from the frenzy of the outside world with Mila, an avatar of his creation, and thus recreate the initial impulse of creation (Frankenstein enacts a similar pattern whereby the monstrous creature causes the death of the entire family of his creator until the two of them alone are left in a final confrontation). However, as he soon realises, this hermetic scenario is unnatural—indeed, it is against nature and therefore troped as incestuous, with Malik turning into Mila’s surrogate father, in an echo of his own traumatic quasi-incestuous relationship with his stepfather. This awareness is the culmination of the dark creative force evoked by the motif of the fury, which is further exacerbated when he fears that his Jekyll persona, which arose in London, has become a serial killer.

17Overall, the artistic subjectivity in this novel is destabilised and contradictory, as it finds artistic creation incompatible with familial procreation, a development of the theme of the mutual exclusivity of fatherhood and art in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Malik’s ontological crises are related to his relationship with his creations—the renegade Little Brain causes his split into a dark and light self, Jekyll and Hyde, while Kronos and his subsequent avatar in Lilliput Blefuscu become his doubles and alter egos that ultimately escape his conceptual control in the same way as Little Brain. Thus, the authorial subjectivity in this novel is doubly decentred: first internally split and then doubled, both processes leading to a profound ontological crisis that reflects the crisis of authorship that is the dominant theme of Fury.

18In both cases, Malik’s authorial self is progressively ‘unselfed’ and left unmoored even from the last anchor of his identity—the world of his own invention. Bearing in mind the religious and mythical paradigms of creation on which the novel rests, this is a parodic echo of modern man’s dismissal of his Creator-God as an anachronous fiction and the various repetitions of this model in the dethronement, dismemberment and/or murder of father-gods/creators that are abundantly alluded to in the novel. As mentioned above, the Little Brain/Mila scenario is represented as incestuous and therefore transgressive; The Kronos scenario equally leaves Malik unable to conceive of a productive orientation and meaning both for his authorial identity and for his creations. The motifs of the mask and the double that represent his two creations hint at the negation of the authorial subject as the dominant paradigm of identity in this novel. Thus, the popularity of the Kronos saga leads to the appropriation of their iconography by the revolutionaries of Lilliput-Blefuscu, who all wear masks with the faces of Malik’s creations, in what Malik describes as ‘a strange piece of mask theatre’ (Fury 235). Their leader wears the mask of Kronos who, as mentioned, is modelled after Malik himself and therefore when he comes face to face with the Commander, he does not exist as his own self, but merely as the copy of his own copy.

19This immense ‘Theater of Masks’ in which an entire country has ‘reinvented itself in his image’ is a repeated reenactment, on a larger scale, of the primal scene of creation that Malik sought in his relationship with Mila, the real-life avatar of Little Brain. Here too, he is locked up alone with real-life avatars of his other creations, in an identical atmosphere of furious menace and transgression. In Lilliput-Blefuscu he is completely non-entitised as a subjectivity as he loses his ontological essence: he no longer functions as the ‘original’ on which Kronos/Babur/the Commander was modelled, but a copy of the copy of the copy. It is out of this ontological void Malik experiences that arises his betrayal of his own authorial legacy when he suggests that the political crisis on the island be solved by an American intervention and, presumably, invasion, which is the ultimate betrayal of his postcolonial credentials. In this way, Malik comes to follow the downward trajectory of Little Brain and become reduced from a subversive, de-canonising voice questioning authority to a neo-coloniser who subjugates an entire history of resistance and revolution against an oppressor to the demands of his own aesthetic whims and personal drama. In the end, Malik is metaphorically expelled from his own invented world, which is left to its own devices, unsupervised by its Creator-God.

20Having returned to London, to the only world that still, however tenuously, upholds his status as a progenitor in the wider sense of the term ‘author,’ i.e. ‘a person who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements’ (Said 83), he tries to reclaim his ‘authorship’ by renewing the ties with the son he has neglected and all but forgotten. However, what he seeks is not the usual fatherly and filial love, but a vindication of his authorial status. Bouncing on a bouncy castle in order to catch his son’s attention, he subconsciously reenacts another artistic archetype, the only one that requires the presence of a son for the father to mean something, that of Daedalus and Icarus. The imagery of this last scene is indicative, as it conveys Malik’s anxiety of authorship:

The noise that emerged from him was awful and immense, a roar from the Inferno, the cry of the tormented and the lost. . . . Asmaan turned and saw his father up there, his only true father flying against the sky, . . . His only true father taking flight like a bird . . . ‘Look at me, Asmaan! I’m bouncing very well! I’m bouncing higher and higher!’ (Fury 259)

21Thus, the novel’s ending conveys Malik’s last attempt to re-constitute himself as an author by plunging into the heights of artistic creation like Daedalus, the Ur-artist, the ‘old father’ and ‘artificer’ whom Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus claimed as a spiritual inspiration through which to forge his authorial identity. The repetition of the phrase ‘his only true father’ confirms Malik’s desire to be seen, by both his son and the reader, as something more than a merely biological progenitor, perhaps as the spiritual ancestor that Saleem and Moraes, like Joyce’s Stephen, so desperately sought. The dual incarnation of the archetypal artist—as the moderate father who survives and the impulsive son who flies too near the sun and dies—encodes the demise of the son (Icarus/Asmaan) and the survival of the father (Daedalus/Malik), but coming as it does after the expulsion of the artist from his last identitary anchorage, Malik’s self-projection as the mythical artist cannot but be a delusion, the last cry of the Author-God before he is relegated to oblivion and nothingness.

The Ontological Quests of Quichotte

22Like Fury, Quichotte explores authorial subjectivity in relation to the work of art, namely in relation to the fictional character, who becomes the author’s alter ego and a mirror self through whom he makes sense of his own life. As we saw, the earlier novel makes use of several mythical and archetypal paradigms to throw a revealing light on how the author’s self is destabilised and rendered more complex once the author breathes life into his artistic creations. The latter novel continues and develops this theme by harnessing both literary and mystical hypotexts in order to shed a new light on how Rushdie perceives authorial subjectivity in his most recent fiction.

23Through its eponymous hero, it combines a modern retelling of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the Ur-text of the powerful effect of literature on readers, and the mystic quest of Aţţār’s Conference of the Birds, re-contextualised as the story of a demented consumer of reality and other junk TV programmes who sets out on a road trip across America on a quest for his Beloved, a talk show host named Salma R. Through the frame plot, featuring Quichotte’s (and Quichotte’s) Author, Rushdie’s novel develops the exploration of the nature of authorship by re-staging it in an originary moment, by means of its conception of the Author as a generic, Everyman figure and its engagement with the very beginnings of the history of the novel through the paradigmatic Cervantean themes of the power of literature, elusive authorship and the interwoven categories of the author, the character and the reader.

24In terms of subjectivity, Quichotte deftly plays with both an essentialist and a constructionist conception of identity. The former is articulated in the generic appellation of the author as ‘the Author,’ which reveals an engagement with authorial subjectivity as a general, essential category, while the latter is put into play by the gradual constitution of the generic Author through the character he writes into being, the eponymous Quichotte. In this novel, neither the author nor the other characters in the frame plot have proper names and are instead represented in generic terms denoting their familial relationship mainly to the Author, who is also referred to as Brother, in relation to whom we have Sister and Son. The lack of a proper name for the author hints at Rushdie’s engagement with the originary aspect of authorial subjectivity, a continuation of the metaphysical conception of the authorial subject in The Satanic Verses; at the same time, through the capitalised Author, Rushdie resuscitates Fury’s exiled creator and Barthes’ dead author by positing a sort of an authorial Everyman in the process of becoming as he writes his manuscript about Quichotte. Overall, the ontological landscape of Quichotte is represented by characters (and their author) who are ultimately unknown and unknowable, destabilised by multiple selves and names or quasi-names such as pseudonyms or nicknames.

25The parallel stories, one of which centres on the Author and the other on his character Quichotte, demonstrates the mutual imbrication of author and character and of narrative and ontological levels. The Author is the last in the long line of the Rushdiean diasporic protagonists, ‘not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down “prop roots” as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots!’ However, his multiple rootedness is here used not to assert the ontological productivity of postcolonial hybridity, as in the previous novels, but to explore it as a productive site for creating art: ‘It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil’ (Quichotte 28). With this, the metafictional dimension becomes a central preoccupation of the novel and the other themes it touches upon, such as the search for love, the social evils of Trump’s America, racism, xenophobia, immigration and diasporic life, become of secondary importance. The questions of ‘who is the Author,’ or ‘who is an Author’ and how he comes into being are explored through the parallel stories about the Author and Quichotte, his fictional alter ego.

26Quichotte is a travelling salesman of Indian origin, who adopts the Cervantean pseudonym when he decides to begin a correspondence with his beloved, the talk show host Salma R. Defamiliarised from his banal ordinary self, the newly created Quichotte becomes a great man with a mission, which he likens to a knight’s quest for the Grail and to the thirty birds’ quest for the Simurg in Aţţār’s Conference of the Birds.

27The mystic Sufi poem teaches the path to the surrender of the self to the Divine by means of a purification of the senses in order to prepare the soul for an enlightenment in which perception and judgement are unclouded by earthly bias, passions and limitations. It is an allegory that on its surface level narrates the story about the desire of the birds to have a king, since they alone are without a leader, whereupon the Hoopoe, the bird that in Muslim tradition is credited to have been the emissary of King Solomon to Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, tells the birds that they do indeed have a king—Simurg, who resides behind Mount Caucasus. The difficult journey to find their king will take the birds through seven valleys covered with forests: the valleys of the Quest, Love, Knowledge, Independence and Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment and Stupefaction, and Poverty and Annihilation (Aţţār). Journeying through the valleys, the quester undergoes a progressive annihilation of the self until the self disappears into a unity with the universe. By the time the birds pass the seventh valley, only thirty have remained of the many millions who set out on the quest. Illuminated by the sun:

[i]n the reflection of their faces these thirty birds of the earth beheld the face of the Celestial Simurg. When they cast furtive glances towards the Simurg, they perceived that the Simurg was no other than those self-same thirty birds. In utter bewilderment they lost their wits and wondered whether they were their own selves or whether they had been transformed into the Simurg. Then, to themselves they turned their eyes, and wonder of wonders, those self-same birds seemed to be one Simurg! Again, when they gazed at both in a single glance, they were convinced that they and the Simurg formed in reality only one Being. (Aţţār 79–80)

28Quichotte’s own quest is both a literal journey across America to find Salma R. and a metaphorical one that involves an exploration and testing of the self so that the searcher is worthy of unification with his ideal—the Grail in romance lore, God in Sufi mysticism (who is also referred to as ‘the Beloved’) and the beloved woman to whose glory the knight dedicates his exploits. Like Salma’s and the Author’s, Quichotte’s decentred and unstable subjectivity derives from his diasporic identity, suspended between the East and the West, dominated by the need to make his past (memories, traumas, sins, regrets) cohere with his present in a world that is increasingly represented as faulty and in the process of disintegration, about to be swallowed into an apocalyptic void. The apocalyptic overtones of Quichotte’s quest are further emphasised by Rushdie’s intertextual reference to Katherine MacLean’s short story ‘Pictures Don’t Lie,’ in which the expected friendly contact with aliens, who have trustingly undertaken a journey to the Earth, ends tragically because it turns out that they are microscopic. The ontological difference here precludes a union between the humans and the aliens, as the latter are about to perish at their landing site, while the former are powerless because their visitors are too small to detect without a magnifying glass. One of the other hypotexts to which Rushdie acknowledges his indebtedness, Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God,’ has an apocalyptic ending, which occurs when the computer acquired by the monks at a Tibetan monastery finishes compiling all the various combinations of the possible names of God, whereupon humanity fulfills the role for which it was created and God’s purpose is achieved. Hence, humanity should be annihilated. The point of view is that of the two computer engineers sent to Tibet to supervise the work, who, wishing to avoid the inevitable disappointment of the monks when they realise their misconception, abandon the lamasery before the completion of the computer’s last cycle, only to find that at the designated moment, the stars begin to go out. Both science fiction short stories stage encounters, actual or impending, between different ontological beings—humans, and microscopic aliens and God, respectively—that spell disaster, and Rushdie hints at the possibility of such an outcome for his protagonist. However, the predominant tone of the novel’s ending, I would argue, is one of elevation rather than annihilation.

29Multiply decentred, Rushdie’s two protagonists, the Author and Quichotte, seek to re-integrate their split, doubled and contradictory selves: the former by means of writing, the latter by his intersubjective self-grafting onto the Quixotic tradition of demented readers/art-consumers who find it hard to distinguish between reality and fantasy. In both cases, it is fiction that serves as a conduit to a heightened self-perception, which in turn allows the two protagonists to re-establish themselves as brothers, fathers, and, in Quichotte’s case, a lover. Through writing the story of Quichotte, the Author, for his part, seeks to validate his authorship and constitute himself as an author.

30The arduous path towards this self-awareness, articulated through the Sufi allegory of the mystic’s union with the divine, for Quichotte connotes an apocalyptic ending of his world and an entry into another dimension of being—into the world of the Author! Quichotte thus dramatises the migratory ontological essence shared by author and character, who seem to inhabit realities of the same ontological reality rather than a ‘real’ and a fictional one respectively, with one migrating from his reality into the other’s and vice versa. It is the Author and not God or Salma who stands at the end of Quichotte’s journey of self-discovery, who is the true self that he finds reflected in the mystical Other, his very own Simurg. To follow the terms of Aţţār’s allegory, the soul’s union with the divine connotes a dismantling of the I-Thou dichotomy, so that there is no concept of self and Other anymore, but a complete merging of the soul with the spirit of the world. In Rushdie’s novel, author and character become one, the latter’s ontological status levelled with that of the former’s, into whose reality he, his fictional status shed, is re-born.

31Quichotte’s materialisation in the Author’s world is described in an imagery suggesting both a sacred ritual and the birth of a new life, both of which emphasise the sanctity of the authorial craft. Thus, before writing the last page of his manuscript, the Author has performed his writerly ritual, without which he would not be able to work, namely has arranged his thirteen venerated objects on his desk and on the mantelpiece. As the narrator further states, ‘[o]ften at the end of a working day the Author would fall asleep at his desk, his forehead resting on the wood, bowed down before the computer screen as if performing some ancient rite of worship’ (Quichotte 389–390), and it is in this state of consciousness that he sees Quichotte irrupting into his room, leaving his ‘embryonic’ existence in the Author’s fiction through a small aperture to ‘burst into’ the real world ‘helpless, puny, gasping for air’ (Quichotte 390), like a newborn baby.

32By situating the authorial scene of writing in the realms of the sacred and the biological and thus appropriating for fiction their life-giving and life-enriching potential, Quichotte foregrounds the apotheosis of the intra-textual Author, which also implicates the extra-textual one, Rushdie himself. By a further exchange of places, it is not only Quichotte’s Author who installs himself in the seat vacated by the mystical God, but the Author’s author, Salman Rushdie, who has been playfully alluding to himself all along. Bearing in mind Rushdie’s predilection for activating the etymological and cultural meanings of his name, we can conclude that the name for Quichotte’s beloved, an appellation that, when capitalised, could also refer to God—Salma R.—has been a red herring all along, a mask which, at the end of the reader’s journey, reveals Salman R.

33In a novel emphasising the writing of fiction as a tool for guaranteeing the Author’s purpose in life and validating his existence, although initially merely imitating the reality of the Author, fiction gradually becomes so powerful as to engulf reality, which itself becomes an imitation of the imaginative one in which Quichotte resides. Just as Quichotte steps into the Author’s world, so too the Author steps into Quichotte’s and thus becomes a fiction himself. In the end, we find out that Quichotte’s thirteen numinous objects, which he carries with himself wherever he goes and which he carefully and ritualistically arranges in precise order, are also the Author’s, but because they have been first introduced in relation to the former, it appears as if they have migrated into the frame plot from the fictional one rather than the other way round. At the end of the novel, the implicit narrator mentions the Author’s most precious possession, ‘a little silver ingot, an inch high, on which was engraved the map of unpartitioned India. This was his greatest talisman, his open-sesame, his magic lamp’ (Quichotte 389). These images conflate a self-reference on Rushdie’s part, who in an interview confesses that he, like other authors, has his own sacred objects or ‘little totems’ that he keeps around him while he works, one of which being ‘a little inch-high block of silver, Indian silver, engraved with the map of the unpartitioned continent of India and Pakistan, which was given to me as a present by a friend of my father’s when I was one day old’ (Reder 129) and intertextual references to some of the dominant metaphors in his other novels, namely Saleem’s perforated sheet in Midnight’s Children, which was his ‘talisman’ and ‘open-sesame’, as well as Saladin’s magic lamp in The Satanic Verses. By calling attention to his autobiography and to his oeuvre, Rushdie foregrounds his authorial presence in his text and inscribes himself, as the author of the novel, into the fluid authorial subjectivity with which he ends his novel.

34The dissolution of self into the Absolute encoded in the mystical layer grafted onto the novel is reinscribed as a dissolution of the various authorial selves—author (Rushdie), character (the Author) and character-of-the-character (Quichotte)—and their collapsing into one another, creating a multi-layered Overauthor/Overartist/Authorial Everyman. This conception of authorial subjectivity is represented as increasingly intertextual and evocative almost exclusively in relation to other texts, paramount of which is Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose protagonist is another layer enriching and rendering even more complex the figure of the Overauthor developed in this novel. Rushdie’s Quichotte who, in his quixotic delusion, thinks that he is about to pass through a portal leading to an alternative space-time continuum, in fact crosses over from fiction into reality and in the process undergoes an ontological growth. This climactic moment represents an apogee of the creating power of literature to widen the horizons of the cultural and conceptual maps of its readers and, in the novel, an apotheosis of the Author, who, at his most exalted, becomes clearly recognizable as a surrogate for Rushdie. This metafictional aspect of the authorial subjectivity, in rendering permeable the distinctions between fictional and real self, performs the crucial function of ‘explor[ing] the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text’ (Waugh 2). This ‘ironic flaunting of the Teller’ (Waugh 131) in the tale paradoxically demarcates the social irrelevance and almost complete cultural redundancy of Rushdie’s author in the real world, who is left with fiction—his own and that of his revered predecessors—as his only existential reassurance. Ontologically overdetermined (intra- and inter-textually, metafictionally and autobiographically), the authorial subjectivity in Quichotte gestures at the constructed image of the author.

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Bibliographie

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Trajanka Kortova Jovanovska, « Authorial Subjectivity in Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Quichotte »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 18 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16291 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141gj

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Trajanka Kortova Jovanovska

Trajanka Kortova Jovanovska has researched and studied in the UK, France and the Americas. She completed her PhD at Avignon University in 2022. Her dissertation has been published by Ethics International Press under the title Salman Rushdie and Postcolonial Authorship: The Ethics of Intellectual Practice. Her research interests have focused on postcolonial Anglophone and Hispanophone literature. The broad research topics that have been her primary focus are conceptions of identity and authorship; more specifically, she has written about contemporary authors (Rushdie, Ondaatje, Marquez, Coetzee, Saramago), literature and religion (sacred and profane authorship, blasphemy), literature and history, Bakhtinian theory, borders and cultural encounters, intertextuality and comparative literature.

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