Rushdie’s self-ironizing ambiguity marks ironic distance from his own claims

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Although I think this may be one effect of these books, it could be argued that their very qualities of rawness and at times crude propagandism actually distract from their endeavor to create fully convincing fictive simulations from which relevant lessons can be drawn for our “real world.” This distraction has to do with the matter of mimesis, the way the books make their truth claims, how they manage their reality effects. Exploring this issue also requires that we consider questions of genre because it, too, conditions how we receive and interpret literary texts. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 213 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rushdie’s ironic satiric tone smuggles in the metropolis’s own cliches unexamined. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 608; Irony works only where shared self-evidence makes proof superfluous; Crude propagandism in misery memoirs undercuts their own truth-claims — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 213 (+1 more)

Related

• Rushdie’s ironic satiric tone smuggles in the metropolis’s own cliches unexamined. (similarity 0.89)
• Rushdie’s leavetaking rhetoric collapses into the ambivalence it claims to overcome (similarity 0.84)
• Crude propagandism in misery memoirs undercuts their own truth-claims (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Rushdie’s ironic satiric tone smuggles in the metropolis’s own cliches unexamined. #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 608
• Irony works only where shared self-evidence makes proof superfluous #complicates (0.72)
• Crude propagandism in misery memoirs undercuts their own truth-claims #exemplifies (0.72) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 213