Rushdie’s ironic satiric tone smuggles in the metropolis’s own cliches unexamined.

Evidence

The tone is obviously satiric, even sardonic, and the follies listed here are of course not his own but, we are told, the West’s. The tone of mockery is designed, meanwhile, to destabilize the meaning of the passage itself. Despite this strategem, however, one can detect the tendency to repeat, almost unthinkingly, the commonplaces and even inaccuracies of the metropolis’s High Culture. It is doubtful, for example, that something called ‘the West’ was, in the summer of 1967, ‘in the clutches of optimism’; that was the year the Vietnamese finally began concentrating their forces for what became the Tet offensive, and at lease a parr of ‘the West’- American imperialism, for examplewas not at all ‘optimistic’ It is equally doubtful that ‘optimism’ - the idea that ‘the fut’ure still exists’, the hope that we ‘would overcome some day’, the conviction that ‘there is a ‘world to change’ - is as such a ‘disease’ (a ‘microscopic, invisible bacillus’, we are playfully told). — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 608

Categorization

• XREF: This is Ahmad’s core method: unmasking ironic distance that still reinscribes First-World commonplaces — directly relevant to whether strategic essentialism’s ironic stance can escape residual essentialism. — connects to: Rushdie’s narrative form cannot sustain a claim to quintessential Indianness. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 491; Rushdie’s self-ironizing ambiguity marks ironic distance from his own claims; Rushdie’s leavetaking rhetoric collapses into the ambivalence it claims to overcome — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 530