Rushdie’s exilic lightness differs from Joyce’s willed, tragic self-exile

Evidence

There is still, in the young Joyce, a sense of ‘home an.d friends’, and even an accompanying sense of desolation in having to choose self-exile; there is also an intentionality, a choice, however tragic, as well as a full-blooded irony about one’s own undertaking and about the kind of rhetoric which frequently accompanies such undertakings; remarkable in all this is the pun on the word ‘forge’; nor is there any sense that the writer has ‘floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time’ … Rushdie’s stance is different. Pakistan - or India, for that matter - is precisely not home; neither the joining nor the coming loose has by now, with Midnight’s Children behind him, the immediacy of a willed and necessary self-wounding that may require the language of iron and smithy; what we have, instead, is an image of tenuous and possibly flaccid rubber, ‘elasticity’; and what impresses one about ‘I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across, is that someone or something else, perhaps History itself, appears to be doing the translating, t.he bearing across. It is perhaps the lightness of being that comes from having ‘floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time’ which makes it possible for the author to mock himself into wanting to say his ‘last words on the East’, in a parody of the flip confidence that one would encounter later in Naipaul’s Among the Believers. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 534

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rushdie shifted from a myth of unbelonging to one of excess belongings. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 493