Rushdie’s leavetaking rhetoric collapses into the ambivalence it claims to overcome
Evidence
There is a quality of linguistic quicksand in all such passages, as if the truth of each utterance were conditioned by the existence of its opposite, and Rushdie seems forever ro be raking back with one hand what he has given with the other: the will to take leave is poised against the impossibility ofleaveraking; he has been coming loose but is still ‘joined’; he is still joined but only by ‘elastic’ bonds, and he is not sure that he likes the fact of continued joining (joined, ‘whether I like it or not’); he makes statements, bur he does not believe in them; the fictive and the real coexist but do not correspond; not only his text but he, himself, exists ‘at a slight angle to reality’; not his text but he is ‘translated’, ‘borne across’; the translation occurs not on the semantic bur on the existential level. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 530
Categorization
- XREF: This reads as the postcolonial emigration analogue of strategic essentialism’s bind: adopting an identity stance that cannot be sustained because its own self-canceling structure undermines the claimed position — parallels Spivak’s coining and qualification lineage the reader is tracing. — connects to: Rushdie’s self-ironizing ambiguity marks ironic distance from his own claims; Rushdie shifted from a myth of unbelonging to one of excess belongings. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 493; Rushdie’s narrative form cannot sustain a claim to quintessential Indianness. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 491 (+1 more)
- DEFINE: Maps the specific textual signature of existential (not semantic) translation/ambivalence — the difference between a claimed and an enacted identity position.
Broader Connections
- Rushdie’s self-ironizing ambiguity marks ironic distance from his own claims
#corroborates(0.85) - Rushdie’s narrative form cannot sustain a claim to quintessential Indianness.
#complicates(0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 491 - Rushdie’s ironic satiric tone smuggles in the metropolis’s own cliches unexamined.
#complicates(0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 608 - Rushdie shifted from a myth of unbelonging to one of excess belongings.
#expands(0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 493