When Quichotte awoke the next morning, he heard the improbable sound of breakfast sizzling in a pan outside his tent. A dark-haired young man—tall, skinny, his build remarkably similar to Quichotte’s own—was frying eggs and bacon. The young man had his back to Quichotte and wore a red-white-and-blue-check lumberjack shirt over blue jeans with turn-ups and held the pan in his right hand over the flame . . . Here was a visible, tall, handsome (if a little bony-faced), strapping teenage lad with a grin on his face and a hearty appetite for food. . . . ‘A real, live boy’, he said. ‘Truly, anything can happen today’. (Rushdie 2019, 103 104)
1This is the material evidence (the eggs, the pan, the shirt, the jeans, the very body of the boy) that helps Quichotte realise he now has a flesh-and-blood son, ‘visible’ yet ‘improbable’, who leaped out of nowhere after he made a wish. The sentence uttered by the protagonist of Rushdie’s twelfth novel, ‘anything can happen today’, is a cliché of sorts by an ageing man who has seen it all. Besides, he redundantly introduces it with the adverb ‘truly’ to emphasise the point he wants to make, to himself or to the reader, already well acquainted with magic roughly a quarter into the novel. This paper contends that matter and materiality predominate in Quichotte, a novel staged as a loose rewriting of Cervantes’ Don Quixote: the descriptive pattern consists in finding material evidence of the characters’ existence, as the last resort in a world that is increasingly opaque and difficult to grasp. A warning for our times, where, truly, anything will happen, and where reality exceeds fiction, the cliché reflects the general tone of disenchantment of the novel, which makes the characters fear the worst, starting with their own unreality. Yet it does not prevent them from remaining the amused observers of what befalls them, even when they encounter fairies, talking things and animals, metamorphic and monstrous figures who shed light and often explain what cannot be explained in rational terms.
- 1 In all his novels, magic amplifies reality, reflects the strangeness and the monstrousness of human (...)
- 2 According to theorists of postmodernism, the grand narratives that used to explain our world (Lyota (...)
- 3 See for example the works of Beaumont or Holland. The latter deems it necessary to move beyond the (...)
- 4 ‘Les deux traits essentiels du réalisme moderne : . . . Des événements réels de la vie quotidienne, (...)
2From the 1980s on, magic realism has often been used to define Rushdie’s oeuvre, and Rushdie’s oeuvre has in turn sustained the theory of magic realism.1 Following this body of work, I would like to characterise more precisely the kind of realism displayed in Quichotte, by highlighting how representations emerge from this foil of fantasy in a renewed way involving a focus on matter, and by showing that it is not just constructed via a reactivation of old tricks. The category of realism has long been considered an antagonist of postmodernist writing, to which Rushdie is also commonly associated, because his narratives unfold within a frame of reference that is not mimetic but generic, and because they represent the process of representation rather than a so-called finished world.2 But I contend that postmodernist techniques, rather than excluding, reinvent it to represent a changing reality: ‘[t]here are realisms that arise out of dissatisfaction with the limits of the realism that preceded it’ (Jameson 2012, 123). Theory and criticism have of late done away with the old opposition between realism and experimental, reflexive writing, by acknowledging that realism ought to be set free from historical boundaries once and for all and considered as inherent in all writing.3 Taking their cue from Auerbach’s definition of modern realism, as writing that represents daily human experience (especially that of the inferior social strata, and the immersion into contemporary history4) and takes it seriously, those critics have given back its currency to realism, starting with Fredric Jameson, whose monumental work, The Antinomies of Realism, has made of realism no less than a literary program for the future.
3This paper thus analyses how realism runs through a novel whose ambition is to portray contemporary America while also presenting itself as second-hand and parodic. I will first look at descriptions where material elements prevail and question the ideological value of the present. Then I will engage in the case study of the character of Sancho, to address the materiality of bodies and language. Finally, the question of authorship and creation inherited from Cervantes will lead us to formulate hypotheses on closure and storytelling.
4The figure of the wandering knight has always loomed large in the fiction and nonfiction of Rushdie, who claims he belongs to that tradition of writers who ‘[understand] the unreality of reality and the reality of the world’s waking nightmare, the monstrous mutability of the everyday, the irruption of the extreme and improbable into the humdrum of the quotidian’ (Rushdie 2012, 342). So, the publication of a work inspired by Don Quixote came as no surprise:
The children of Tristram Shandy, to use Kundera’s term—or the children of Quixote, or of Scheherazade—may not be as plentiful as those of Clarissa Harlowe, but you will find them in every literature, in every place in every time. . . . They are everywhere, forming an alternative, joyous, carnivalesque ‘great tradition’ to set alongside the realistic one. . . . The truth is not arrived at by purely mimetic means. (Rushdie 2021, 25-26)
5The protagonist, Ismail Smile, a 70-year-old pharmaceutical traveling salesman, is imagined by another character, Sam DuChamp, referred to as Brother. The latter is a successful author of Indian origin, writing spy thrillers, but for once he decides to veer away from stories about lies and deception, and write something more ‘truthful’. This story is a quest for love, which begins once Ismail renames himself Quichotte to pursue his lady, a Bollywood-star-turned-television-anchor, an opioid addict who probably became hooked on account of childhood trauma involving sexual abuse. Before long, Quichotte magically makes a son appear, after he sees a shooting star and makes a wish, and he names him Sancho. The road trip literally provides the engine for the novel which races against time: it is necessary to find Salma before cataclysmic climate change triggers the end of the world. But it is also a race against American history, from California to New York, during which they encounter history in the making, on a territory plagued by an opioid crisis, and by systemic racism.
6The novel comprises several narrative layers: the story of Quichotte on his quest, the story of the author of Quichotte’s story, but also the reflexive comments of the author Rushdie, a technique which recurs in the second part of Don Quixote, when the protagonists discuss the literary success of their adventures. Each narrative level relates the background of each character, even secondary ones, and this forms a tentacular network of family stories reminiscent of The Moor’s Last Sigh or The Ground beneath her Feet. The pattern of stories within stories is used to accumulate knowledge and causal effects, but also to confuse and complexify, in the manner of the embedded stories to be found in Don Quixote’s first part, but also in the Arabian Nights and the Indian digressive tales of the great epics. Those stories rely on funny and vivid writing where characters of one universe have twin characters in the other, face the same types of struggles, such as their attempts at family reconciliation after long periods of estrangement—the writer figure, Sam DuChamp, and his son, even mimic Quichotte and Sancho’s quest at the end of the novel, embarking on a road trip of their own. In fact, the phenomenal world is described similarly in each narrative layer, making so-called fiction and so-called reality equal. For example, in the middle of the novel, Sam DuChamp enters his house to find an intruder sitting at his desk. Taken aback, the only meaning he can trust comes from materiality. This new character is first described as staring at his ‘iMac screen’ (218) and sitting in his ‘Aeron office chair’. He is ‘[a] large Japanese American gentleman, six feet three, two hundred and seventy pounds’, and his clothes are described by way of a gradual close-up:
An expensive dark blue silk suit, with a pale blue silk pocket square, a white shirt with a high thread count, a red Hermes tie in which a small golden cat was chasing a smaller golden wind-up mouse, and a small button badge on his left lapel wearing a miniature image of the great seal of the United States. There was writing on the button badge which was too small to read (218).
7As he points to details, the narrator cannot see beyond a certain point, the writing being ‘too small to read’. The limit of description lies in the human limitations of the senses, but also in the inability to endow things with meaning. Despite the temptation of transparency, categories and labels, with brand names, minute descriptions of the fabric, and a precise sense of bodily presence, some undecipherable script remains. This might be called a matter of postmodernist self-awareness, which shatters the mirror of the referential pact, but the scene epitomises one of the stylistic highlights of Quichotte: with identities that always seem shifty and deceitful, material details enable the reader to understand what the story is about. The character in question is Lance Makioka, a federal agent who investigates the activities of Sam DuChamp’s son, a computer wizard accused of piracy and who goes by the—surreal—name Marcel DuChamp. The descriptive struggle at work thus succeeds in conveying valid information for a reader reading for the plot, but material description only goes so far.
8The whole book reads in a similar way; the fictional world emerges through a descriptive process based on material elements: the narrator throws an excess of material details for the sake of realism, but these details are also denied the potential for creating definite meaning, blocking meaning as much as releasing it. Quichotte is a man with ‘a near total preoccupation with the material’ (3), carrying with him a collection of transportable objects he has collected over the years, which he calls ‘home’:
[A] polished ‘found art’ Chinese stone whose patterning resembled a landscape of wooded hills in the mist, a Buddha-like Gandharan head, an upraised wooden Cambodian hand with a symbol of peace in the center of its palm, two starlike crystals, one large, the other small, a Victorian locket inside which he had placed photographs of his parents, three other photographs depicting a childhood in a distant tropical city, a brass Edwardian English cigar cutter made to look like a sharp-toothed dragon, an Indian ‘Cheeta Brand’ matchbox bearing the image of a prowling cheetah, a miniature marble hoopoe bird and a Chinese fan (11).
- 5 Rushdie has often claimed this, in his essays and in his fiction (see, for example, Imaginary Homel (...)
- 6 Addressing more specifically British writers from the 1980s, Catherine Bernard places the question (...)
9Such an ecumenical collection hints at the philosophy of uprootedness Rushdie has developed over the years—refusing to pay allegiance to a nation or a religion, and instead creating his personal, imagined roots5. But this philosophy feels suddenly less confident once reduced to this list of silent objects. Frozen in time, prone to dust or loss, the keepsakes ask the question of their authenticity and conjure up death, as mere relics of a past long gone. The hero might well claim he is not a religious man, yet he resorts to animistic devotion with them, recalling infantile hoarding, symptomatic of early-life bonding anxiety. So, from the start, things signal disease: ‘Reality comes back from its own suffering, outer limits, yet weighted with a complex presence, both familiar and foreign, as if alienated. Faced with a sick reality, the novel must ask the urgent question of the referential pact, while admitting that it is stamped as inane’ (Bernard 26, my translation)6. This discrepancy is further explored as the novel unfolds: the more material details, the less lively the characters. Their fictionality is underlined within their staged, fake material décor.
10As soon as his son Sancho takes on a life of his own, Quichotte advises him to buy things: ‘if you’re not buying stuff . . . the system does not recognize you exist’ (104), so he moves on to list shirts, pants, underpants, socks, sneakers, boots, hoodies, coat, hat (104). Similarly, the text teems with minute descriptions of meals, shows, car brands, or drugs: OxyContin, Xanax, Fentanyl, Lithium, Haldol, Naloxone (114), are part of the list of medication consumed by Quichotte’s beloved. Lists hint at the linguistic illusion of mimesis, the belief in the transparency between things and words, but also at ‘a totalitarian vertigo of exhausting the real’ (Hamon 173, my translation). All this creates an uncanny feeling of disgust and waste, and page after page, an efficient criticism of our present time. A character says on television that the new danger is ‘errorism’, a new form of terrorism: ‘the enemies of contemporary reality’ are ‘anti vaxxers, climate loonies, UFOlogists, the religious nuts, the trolls’ (327). The truth is somewhere ‘buried under the rubble of bullshit bombs’ (327). People literally throw things passing as ideas, over the ‘real’ real. This notion that an overwhelming number of things ought to be discarded to attain a more humane world, is taken to a metaphorical level, where whole categories of ideas and people should be discarded as well, reified as mere trash.
11Materiality is enhanced by its redundancy in other worlds, especially on television, and at times on video games, which inflate the effet de réel. The second sentence of the novel, a stylistic exposition of sorts, is composed of a nineteen-line sentence about Quichotte’s excessive consumption of television shows:
He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talks shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll . . . (3).
12Having gorged on a Gargantuan number of images and plots, as Don Quixote had done on chivalry tales, it is no surprise that Quichotte focuses his desire on a ubiquitous TV host. The feast starts with genres that are known and quite predictable (soaps, late-night shows), but then it moves on to peculiar variations, which suggest insanity and disease infecting reality:
. . . [S]inging competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and of course, beauty contests. (4)
- 7 Jonathan Ball has theorised satire in Rushdie’s writing as ‘pessoptimistic’, by reworking the Bakht (...)
13The enumeration conveys the idea of a circus full of freaks engaged in a roller coaster of ‘competitions’, ‘games’, ‘bouts’ for a voyeuristic audience to delight in. The rhythmic pattern of the unending list creates a lull-inducing hypnotic singsong, mimicking the effect of television on its viewers. That way, the list is part of ‘a strategy of contestation, to elicit parodic, or comic, or ironic readings’ (Hamon 166, my translation). It provides the reader with a good reason to condemn reality entirely. So, on the one hand, satire is, healing, and optimistic, but on the other hand, it remains ambivalent because the protagonist, a thinly disguised persona of the author, is also embedded in the world he satirises, and he goes along with it, always taking at face value the fiction that is television.7
- 8 This is the definition of a ‘quixotic fiction’ given by Ardila in his thorough study on Quichotte.
- 9 This paper cannot accommodate a thorough comparative study of Quichotte and Don Quixote. Some scene (...)
14Quichotte imagines his own son, but he is himself the product of a fictional writer’s imagination; likewise, the writer character is a creation of Rushdie, himself an heir to Cervantes. Like Don Quixote, Quichotte is a dreamer, a lunatic who accomplishes nothing; instead, reality reveals itself through him; like Don Quixote, Quichotte has become a ‘psychotic monomaniac through excessive reading of a certain genre, and hence espouses the values which that genre proclaims’.8 Quichotte is literally intoxicated with television shows, the chivalry tales of his time, and his folly is explained by a stroke induced by an overdose of them—one of the ‘classics’ he ponders when looking for ways to woo his lady is ABC’s 1960s show ‘The Dating Game’ (95). As in Don Quixote, one contentious problem is the interpretation of the text as either a fundamentally comic book or a romantic work: following Cervantes, Rushdie stages Quichotte as insane when his obsessions abuse him, but he can also be a wise old man, providing commonsensical advice to his son. As in Don Quixote, the text raises the intertwined problems of the relationship between fiction and reality, and between character and author, by resorting to the same techniques of unceasing commentary on the writing process in particular.9
- 10 This is a feature that belongs to any realist novel, from the 19th century on: ‘The novel is an omn (...)
15The word ‘reality’ is so frequently used in the text that it draws the reader’s attention to its constructedness, as a selection of metafictional comments about the real shows: ‘Reality as we believed it to be has truly ceased to exist’ (186); ‘the pollution of the real by the unreal’ (230), ‘The truth is whatever is put before us to overcome’ (186); ‘the hidden reality of the world’ (254); ‘Reality was this room, this play of shadow and light, this waiting for the call’ (312); ‘[He was] obsessed with the unreal real’ (343); ‘Thinking about this real thing, i.e. the question of being real, I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that the question is about to be answered thanks to an imminent fatal smash up on the road’ (128); ‘Sancho, for all his fictionality, at such times felt he was the real person and Quichotte, the figment’ (142), and so on and so forth. The quotes expose both a continuity and a break in Rushdie’s writing: such comments have always had high currency in his fiction, starting with Shame, where they were precisely aimed at deconstructing the discourse of autocrats, but the sheer amount of them throughout Quichotte points at a limit, even at a nihilistic stance. Contrary to 1983, when Rushdie was critiquing the creation of Pakistan, the object of criticism in the 2019 novel is so diffuse and impossible to name precisely that everything is worth an authorial, ironic intervention. Statements about reality, which often rely on the literal meaning of words and elicit humor in the process, reinscribe fiction into what it really is: textual matter. However evasive and deceptive reality is, the narrator ceaselessly questions its value, thereby always running the risk of absurdity, as the quotes suggest. He superimposes social and political commentary upon that uncertainty, in a more informed, even scholarly way, about racism, Islamist terrorism, the opioid crisis, climate change, Elon Musk’s megalomania, and more generally about a protean and hostile flux of events. This pull toward the news is a way to redirect fiction toward realism, anchoring it in historicity10. But this time, contrary to the early fiction which confidently celebrated the ability of narratives to debunk dictatorships, the metafiction of Quichotte is mostly concerned, as Peter Morey points out, by ‘the intertwined relationship of life and art, and the writer’s vocation as a challenge to mortality’ (Morey 324). In Quichotte, he says, the writer seems ‘little more than a bystander in modern culture wars’ (326).
- 11 In Midnight’s Children similar imagery was used. The main character, too close to the cinema screen (...)
16The character who best embodies this dialectic game between the representation of an uncertain, illusory reality and the demands of historical archiving, let alone historical change, is Sancho. At first, he appears on the passenger’s seat in black and white, a two-dimensional TV-screen image; then, he expresses a wish to become real, and he does. The various stages of creation and emancipation, as in Pinocchio or Frankenstein, define the couple as antagonistic and complementary. Exploring the questions of free will and submission, creation and destruction, Rushdie reenacts his interest in doppelgangers, doubles and twins. But the case of Sancho is specific for several reasons. Because he is defined by his creator, he is referred to as a ‘figment’ (86), a ‘clone’ (92), a ‘slave’ (83) and he laments his lack of freedom. His anguish of disappearing provides a sense of emergency to the novel, following a simple, literal logic: if the creator created me, he could destroy me as well, if he likes. The situation triggers comedy at times, with bouts of rebellion against grumpy old Quichotte, but above all Sancho is a testing ground for finding out what a human bond is in the here and now, and how to reach some sort of mutual understanding. As soon as he appears, Sancho is ‘bounded by the limits of [Quichotte]’, ‘tied to him’ (83). He even says that if he gets too far from him, ‘the signal drops (83): ‘I have to go back to wherever he is to regain full definition’ (83). The metaphors of televisual broadcasting, of high and low definition, of pixels and images that are projected through a remote source of energy11, all convey his fear of meaninglessness and frailty, in the hands of a tyrannical puppet-master who can switch the off-button any time he wants. Quichotte’s Promethean project fulfills his own desire of renewal and infinite self-perpetuation: stuck in a pre-Oedipal state, he brings to mind the figure of Robinson Crusoe in search of an ideal son, who would enable him to quench his thirst for power.
17After covering hundreds of miles together, getting on each other’s nerves in the car, father and son develop a bond, nonetheless, thanks to language. Without a mother and a mother tongue, Sancho was born in a linguistic void, but as the conversation gets more intimate, his father teaches him the subtleties of ‘Bombaiyya’ (152), the vernacular of his native city, and all of a sudden, ‘America became Sancho’s language lesson’ (152). Father teaches son about the different ways to refer to women in Bombayyia according to the so-called categories they belong to:
A sexy girl was maal, literally ‘the goods’. A girlfriend was fanti. A young, hot, but unfortunately married woman was a chicken tikka. In Ann Arbor they paused to take a look at the university campus and Sancho noted that there was a lot of maal walking around (152).
- 12 This gap between literal and metaphorical language, between what is really meant and what is unders (...)
18For both of them, Bombaiyya enhances their understanding of the environment, and of one another: those new words link matter to things, things to emotions, and tie them historically to the world they live in: ‘When there were shootings on the TV, he learned that a gun was a ghoda, which meant “horse” and a bullet was a tablet, or sometimes a capsule. So English, in such mutations, found its way into Bombaiyya too’ (152). Sancho’s fear of nonexistence is pitted against the great liveliness of language, its continuous flux, its perpetual borrowing process. As in Robinson Crusoe, the arrival of a son, Sancho/Friday, coincides with the reintroduction of language. The linguistic groping for roots, etymology, literal meaning, is never a quest for purity or fixity; on the contrary, it is attuned to the mess of the here and now, as Peter Boxall writes in his magisterial 2015 study of the novel, to ‘the ill-fit between names and things’ (30).12
19Incidentally, all proper names raise issues throughout the novel: the writer character has a pen name (Sam DuChamp), but he is also referred to as Brother with a capital B, orThe Author, with a capital A, and his sister is called Sister with a capital S. The protagonist’s real name is Ismail Smile, but he calls himself Quichotte, and Rushdie takes pains to explain how it should be pronounced, à la française, to establish the gap between the original and the new version. The character of Salma, Quichotte’s beloved, is the epitome of inauthenticity. She ‘concealed her secrets behind . . . comedy masks’ (118) and her television show is called Salma, inflating her persona further. Like Quichotte, her made-up identity goes along with a passion for ‘kitsch collectibles of all sorts’ (117) and ‘memorabilia from the collection of other talk show hosts’ (117), thus creating a spiraling impression of by-products going to waste. As Boxall writes, ‘the central fault line of the novel is the failure of the patrimonial glue that binds names and things’ (31). By changing names and inventing nicknames, characters reject conformity to themselves and wear masks, but they also fail to live an authentic life and are condemned to role-playing. Taking on an identity is both a constraint and a relief, and the lunacy of Quichotte is inherently carnivalesque: ‘There is always something in a lunatic that does not belong to him, as if a non-human spirit had been introduced into this soul’ (Bakhtin 58; translation mine).
20True to his ancestor, Quichotte is idealistic, and like him, he is naïve to the point of idiocy. In the middle of their journey, Sancho and Quichotte stop along the road to look at the map. A white woman comes and asks them where their ‘turbans and beards’ are (125). The tone heats up, a crowd forms around them: they are accused of being ISIS terrorists and asked to leave. Quichotte reacts by greeting them ‘with his delightful and usually disarming smile’ (125): ‘It is my good fortune, that having passed through the first valley, my son and I are both blessedly freed from doctrines of all sorts’ (125). Of course, the woman does not understand a word of what he is saying, and she answers, quizzically: ‘Say what?’ (127), in a burst of contempt for a foreigner who speaks an unknown idiom, but which says more about her own ignorance. The woman’s rude question belongs to ‘low style’, and ‘the sublime rhetoric of Don Quixote is used to emphasise the stylistic break and the comedy that ensues’ (Auerbach 346; translation mine). Quichotte’s politeness and old-fashioned manners make for typical, almost stereotypical comedy, and recall a staple of the masterwork, where Don Quixote is often mocked by simple villagers and receives actual blows.
- 13 To Bakhtin, the carnivalesque transforms serious matter into reason for rejoicing: bloody wars, sac (...)
21In such passages, the daily life component is prominent, making it realistic in its most primary features: in just a few words, the woman is accurately described, the mob takes on a life of its own. It is as if realism as a known mode for depicting the world in a documentary way was possible, intermittently, within a general context of doubt about mimesis. By providing glimpses into the real world, the process is the same as in the seventeenth-century text: steeped in his fantasy, the lunatic prevents reality from unfolding unsentenced, but reality tests Quichotte’s folly and determination to keep going and establishes the narrative as realist, anchored in matter, body, language. The novel contains several scenes where the duo receives racist abuse (142–143), where they witness the lynching of an Asian man (144), and racist, bigoted mobs are frequently referred to. The idealism of Quichotte is debunked and lowered towards the level of the corporeal and the material: taking my cue from Bakhtin again13, the scenes of beatings signal the imminence of death, but they also suggest renewal because the narrative moves on, and, for Sancho, takes the form of autonomy and a continuing quest of his own: ‘The beating had further detached Sancho from Quichotte’ (339). Incidentally, if the mob is a staple of the nineteenth-century realist novel, which exposed the masses and their potential for change (one might think of Zola), in Quichotte, its contemporary avatars can be more ominous, hidden in social media: ‘Our age, AG, in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob’ (258, AG being short for ‘After Google’).
- 14 In his last work, which deals with composers as well as writers, Said suggests that late style feat (...)
22As Quichotte’s quest approaches its destination, the text loses its storytelling impetus and its intermittent realistic focus, to acquire urgency and anxiety. The tone of disenchantment, which had been tamed by the joyful enthusiasm of the man in love, takes over when the end is in view. The world seems overtly more hostile, and the empire of superficiality is total: ‘Life has become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead’ (379). This fear of getting out of touch with his own world, recall that of Fury (2001) in which the protagonist roams the streets of New Yorkwondering about the world’s meaninglessness. In Quichotte, disenchantment comes with regrets, barely concealed under fiction, about Rushdie’s own strained family relationships: the protagonist refers to what a work of fiction can do to the members of one’s family when a writer uses intimate details, and he mourns the growing distance with his siblings. Quichotte is endowed with a melancholic tone, and a desire to look back at a life devoted to fiction writing, which Edward Said once theorised as ‘late style’14. With experience, the images of the enchanted world of childhood of his early writing have faded, and protagonists have aged along with its author.
- 15 The trope of the apocalyptic scene is present in all of Rushdie’s novels, except, tellingly, in the (...)
- 16 In a 2015 interview, he mentioned the importance of the genre: ‘Science fiction is where I started (...)
23This anguish over the present coincides with that over the novel’s closure15: the apocalyptic end is announced through a series of deflagrations where characters disappear one after the other. Sancho goes first: far from his father, ‘he went from high definition to early analog’, ‘his body popped and broke and became pixilated’ (353), and ‘then there was nobody there’ (354). The relapse to nothingness was always a risk, inherent from the outset. Then, after the happy reunion of Quichotte and Salma, the couple is sent to another dimension on a machine invented by Evel Cent, a fictional Elon Musk, ‘the scientist-entrepreneur, chairman and CEO of the new-tech giant CentCorp, [who] was insistently, even stridently, presenting his eschatological solution to anyone who would listen’ (315). The hint at science-fiction recalls Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, and the writer’s recurring pull toward the genre, which he has often claimed as one of his main sources of inspiration.16 The mission fails because the atmosphere is unfit for survival, after all. Quichotte and Salmaare described as bumping into the present time: ‘Reality was this room, this play of shadow and light, this waiting for the call’ (312). All this storytelling was just a waiting room, reminiscent of Scheherazade’s struggle against time.
24One of the final images is that of a threshold, where Quichotte and his beloved are to step into the unknown, standing ‘in front of an open door’ (389). ‘A long quest comes to an end’, and they risk ‘disappear[ing] into the universe. And just possibly into something new’ (389). Then, the novel ends with the Author at his desk, described with the full set of Quichotte’s knick-knacks carefully aligned in front of him: ‘Without these objects around him he couldn’t work’ (389). So, the reader is back to square one, with the same collection of things that are the only evidence that the story really occurred, although there is nobody left to tell the tale. In an absurd or threatening world, ‘what the individual sees and feels is real, is alone real: I was there’, writes David Lodge about modern realism (41). In a sense, Rushdie is one of those ‘writers who bracket the “I” within another “I” and thus draw attention to . . . the ultimate impossibility of realism’ (41). The material evidence, having traveled from one world to the next, plays the role of a track to follow, a pattern to decipher, and it takes the work of an archeologist to fill the gaps and build meaning around it. But there is more: a microscopic door opens, and two microscopic beings tumble into the Author’s room from their fictional space. The sudden change of scale hints at a return to sanity for Quichotte and his beloved, but is also a sign that they cannot fit, and that, in the end, they remain partially unfathomable, even to their author. This points to the limits of representation, with a script that is becoming too small to read, once again.
25Ever since his first novels, Rushdie has often strived to describe history in the making, be it the decolonising process in India (Midnight’s Children), partition (Shame), migrancy (The Satanic Verses), globalization (The Ground Beneath her Feet), the crisis of the American empire (Fury), the war in Kashmir (Shalimar the Clown), the new oligarchic elite (The Golden House), and so on. Most of his work forms a pattern for representing reality: through identified historical crises, the Rushdian novel undertakes the absurdly monstrous task of describing the real by exhausting it. Some contend that the fatwa fixated the author in a state of crisis, drawn to the ‘fatal attraction of the catastrophic’, trying at best ‘to tame it into mere show or harmless simulation’ (Gonzalez 207). I contend that there is a continuity in the desire to grasp reality in its ever-changing forms, with characters steeped in history, in accordance with Auerbach’s accepted definition of realism, and that the fatwa changed little of that urge to describe the world; rather, it renewed and reinvigorated the desire to do so. Quichotte’s material realism enables its author to reinvent his descriptive process in its inherent ambivalence, giving credence to the notion that realism is alive and capable of hosting history in the making, even when reflexivity comes to test it. Matter and materiality point to an anguish of extinction and closure, which the Western classics by Cervantes, and to a certain extent, Defoe and Indian and oriental storytelling, help, momentarily, to contain.
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