Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown is a particularly interesting novel in that it revels in paradoxes and contradictions. Almost all of the characters in the novel seem to realize and be disturbed by the fact that things are not always what they seem, and that one event, person, or thing can have multiple and contradictory meanings. We see this theme taking shape as early as page 21, when India is thinking about her father, Max Ophuls: “He was never more hidden than when he seemed most open,” (21). A few pages later there is a complex commentary on the state of the modern world, ending with the line “Morality and immorality, the beatified and the corrupted, walked towards cameras, hand in hand, and in love,” (24). The idea that it is not only difficult to separate good from evil, but perhaps inherently impossible, is something that India in particular struggles with in this first chapter. The same idea of the paradoxical seems, however, to transcend time and space, because in the next section, Boonyi, similar contradictions are present and disruptive in the lives of the characters. “The shadow planets existed without actually existing” (45), goes the legend that Pyarelal Kaul teaches to the younger generation and which pervades the culture. The ubiquitous nature of contradiction and paradox throughout Shalimar the Clown is very important to notice and analyze. Although Rushdie often puts these contradictions in the novel so that they appear to be some sort of un-solvable cosmic joke inherent in the world, I think that it also speaks volumes to the personal identities and struggles of the characters. Each of the main characters are trying to establish themselves as whole, coherent beings existing in the world of chaos around them, put continually run up against obstacles within themselves and in the outside world which prevent this. Ultimately I think that the novel is about the characters’ struggle to come to terms with their own identities and map out a place for themselves in the world.
Upon reading the first half of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown, I began to really enjoy the novel after getting through the first section, and a few things distinctly stood out to me. I really admired the way the novel surprisingly begins set in Los Angeles, given that every other text we have read has taken place in the East. The descriptions of Los Angeles were exquisite in that they were able to capture the city in way that portrayed it as seemingly exploited and emphasized the cultural contrasts. In a sense, so far throughout the novel many aspects of Western life is set right next to the ways of the East. On page 22 I found the description of Los Angeles’ provocative society particularly interesting, “An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning very trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires”. As the page continues, Max Ophuls a former ambassador even goes on to attempt to admire the city’s “strip malls for their neon and chain stores for their ubiquity; when he declined to criticize the produce on sale in the farmers’ markets…the bananas made of pulped paper, the odorless flowers”.
The next theme I found heavily emphasized was the conflict of names and the ability of characters to frequently change them. In addition to this, the narrative of the novel is unique in that it is highly conscious of events that are about to take place, and of events that have already taken place by distancing the reader and clueing them into specific moments. This is all done through an extensive and overly descriptive use of language, creating a sense of magical realism. We are aware of many of the characters, and yet we are not fully aware of who they are until the story begins to unfold. Shalimar’s character is illustrated in the first chapter, but it is not until page 50 that we discover he has chosen this name for himself in honor of his lover Boonyi. At first we understand his character as Shalimar, then Noman, then his identity once again changes to “Shalimar the assassin”. Furthermore, Boonyi has chosen this name for herself, and can be considered to be a similar character to India given that both tragically lost their mothers to childbirth. India as well continually comments on how she despises her name, due to the fact that she was named this solely because India was where she was conceived. In the past novels we have read for the class it was undeniably important to look into the significance of names of the various characters, however I feel that throughout Shalimar The Clown, it is crucial to take them into account. Each character’s name is specifically tailored to the character whether it holds a double meaning, or discloses something about a character’s traits and overall persona.
Jeanne Magnetti International Politics and Alphabet Soup In Shalimar the Clown , Max Ophuls finds himself in the middle of negotiations between India and Pakistan, as facilitated by America and several European nations of the UN. This incident is marked by the emergence of an absurd number of acronyms. Max notes that “mastering the language of unpronounceable acronyms… was the true lingua franca of the subcontinent’s political class” (188). He is surrounded by a copious number of initial bearing programs such as a “fuel exchange program (FEP); Pakistan would export its gas (PG) to India and India would send coal (IC) to Pakistan…He further proposed that the two nations cooperate over hydroelectric and irrigation projects (HAIP) in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Tista river system (GBTRS, or GABTRIS). He spoke to the Indian government minister for planning and social work (GOIMPSW or MINPLASOC)…He encouraged his old pal the minister for foreign affairs, GOIMFA Swaran Singh, to send out a feeler to his GOP counterpart concerning the possibility of back channel arms limitation talks (BALT). Indira Gandhi was settling in as GOIPM aka MADAM….America had been infected by a Western strain of the South Asian disease of acronymical initialitis. JFK, RFK, MLK, and POTUS of course was LBJ and UNSGUT was the secretary-general of the UN, U Thant.” (188). This circus culminates humorously in Max’s confusion over what the word ‘schmuck’ stands for “Ah…Sabatoge of Cooperative….what? Harmony Motivated Undertakings Concerning Kashimar?” (189). This untidy jumble of titles and programs causes the negotiations between India and Pakistan to no longer be meaningful or referential. By creating such a baffling few pages of meaningless abbreviations, Rushdie points out one of the sources of the problem with International Conflict. Somewhere in the tangle of politicians seeking to gain profit and influence through some official sounding programs and titles, nations stop communicating. In the novel, both the governments of India and Pakistan agree that “we can’t go on letting our young men perish like this” (189), but neither nation can negotiate the maze of petty politics and find the problem at the center. This problem that Rushdie points out is not only applicable to India and Pakistan but occurs in every organized government at every level.
Rachel Reff The Real Importance of the Character Max Ophuls 04/09/13 In Rushdie’s Salimar the Clown, the man who is assassinated in the story is the U.S. ambassador of India, Max Ophuls. In the story Max is a man who lived in France because his parents were killed in the Nazi’s concentration camps. He marries a British aristocrat and moves to London. When Max gets Boonyi pregnant, the child is taken to London and later to the U.S. It is interesting to note that there is a man in real life named Max Ophuls that too was a Jewish German and left Germany during the war for fear of being killed. He fled to France and when France fell to Germany later moved to the U.S. Is the real Max Ophuls supposed to represent the fictional Max Ophuls? The fictional Max could be portrayed through the real Max because they are both men in the same time frame and same countries. Or is the real Max portraying Rushdie himself? The real Max was constantly fleeing countries for the risk of his life just as Rushdie has had to do. The real Max Ophuls also was a filmmaker, which shows the comparison that Rushdie and him are more alike because they both create a fantasy for others. In which Rushdie could fantasize about Max Ophuls life.
The first two sections of Shalimar the Clown, India and Boonyi, are very different in structure and style. To start, India centers around the ambassador's and Boonyi's daughter, also named India, and revolves around the mystery surrounding her life and the lack of knowledge she possesses. While India is firm in her opinion that she is not like the country she is named after, the book's writing seems to suggest that she is shrouded in ignorance and tucked away so that she is not knowledgeable of her family. One theme that permeates India's section of the novel is mystery--the mystery of her nightmares, the mystery of Shalimar the Clown, the mystery of India's mother's death, the mystery of Max Olphus himself. Nothing at all is explained or revealed and only problems or puzzles litter this section. It ends with India having full knowledge what result might come from her father contacting her at her residence but no way of knowing why or how said solution--her father's death--occurred. She handles it by hiding in her room, sitting alone, ignoring everything, still keeping the theme of mystery present.
Boonyi has a very different tone from India. In stark contrast to the mystery of India, Boonyi is quite exotic and mystical, often referencing gods and other deities to explain all sorts of ideas that now have scientific basis. The aura of exoticism present within Boonyi acts as a way to foreshadow Boonyi's alluring quality in which her relationship with Max Olphus is consummated. We learn some things about the mysteries presented within the first section of the novel but there is still not solid, factual evidence to declare these mysteries solved. While India's chapter is representative of a more Western environment, Boonyi's chapter is indicative of a very stereotypically Eastern setting, playing into an Orientalist perspective. I am not sure what Rushdie's technique was in juxtaposing the two chapters, or to write a text that is Orientalist, but the contrast between the two plays into the subject material of the novel itself.
In class today, we were given a bit of a taste of what the "real" Salman Rushdie might be like. It is difficult to say if he is really the hero many claim him to be or not, but one thing is for sure, at least, in my mind: Shalimar the Clown is not the work of a literary genius. India, the first introduced character, is an extremely sensual but conflicted to the point of being mentally ill, is almost too obviously an allegory for the country of India itself, a beautiful, sensual country torn apart by ideological conflict. But it's too obvious a parallel, to the point of being cheesy. India doesn't come across as a real character, but some distanced, poetic being floating in an ether of abstractions and metaphors. In fact, because of Rushdie's overly-ornate, supposed "mastery" of the English language, none of the characters come across as real people. Instead, one can tell they exist solely in Rushdie's literature, as mouthpieces for Rushdie's poetic, but ultimately superficial, prose.
Ellen Walpole “Shalimar the Clown” – Week 1 April 9, 2013
The Role of Women and Some Foreshadowing
While reading the first half of Salman Rushdie’s novel, I found myself enjoying reading a more present day novel. The opening setting of India in Los Angeles immediately made it more relatable for me for some reason. I suppose I’ve gotten used to reading novels set in the East in class, so an American setting now, ironically enough, seems “exotic.” I am also appreciating the strong female characterization of India. It is rare that we have read about strong women characters, so India seems to be a nice change of pace.
Also, the character of Boonyi has proved interesting to read. On the night she went to meet her lover, she was the one who took charge and had sex with him when he started to second guess himself and her state of being. Maybe because it is set in a more current setting, but women definitely seem to play a larger role than in the novels we have previously read. Not only did I see foreshadowing, but I also saw unexpected emotions from Shalimar after they had sex and he said “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also” (61).
Since it was previously revealed that Shalimar was a trained assassin and that Boonyi was his one and only love, I assumed she would have something to do with his dark and downward spiral in violence. I also picked up on some foreshadowing when Firdaus Noman, Shalimar’s mother, began to feel uneasy at the end of her pregnancy. When she felt unwell she said that “…the person that’s giving me the shivers right now is still inside here” (72). She was talking about her belly of course, and went on to say that “even before his birth, her son, whom everyone loved the minute he was born, and whose nature was the sweetest, gentlest and most open of any human being in Pachigam, had started scaring her half to death” (72).
It is clear that Shalimar’s happy and innocent childhood came to a quick halt and turned him into the trained killer he is in the present day story line.
After reading the New York Times article in class today I have to admit, it was really a discouraging tone to begin this novel on. The entire article was filled with highly charged political jargon, the type that George Orwell describes as using a lot of words without actually saying much of anything. It is a type of specialized language used to confuse the lay-person who is unfamiliar with it. The purpose is, for lack of a better expression, to "sound" intelligent, while simultaneously expressing ignorant and/or incorrect ideas.
Another issue I took with the article we read in class today was the lack of source citation. Sure, this was an "opinion" column, but some things must be considered even in an opinion column. The New York Times is a major source of news for literally millions of people. This should really be considered when allowing someone to post slanderous material without source citation. Perhaps this is a call to how much emphasis should be placed on journals and magazines especially in regards to what they choose to publish.
Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown” is described as a work of ‘magical realism’ on sites like Amazon and Wikipedia. It’s true that non-Euro-North American writers have used this style of narrative for decades. Although it’s used for different reasons, its main goal is to embrace the negative description, classification, or binary of a specific people and turn it into something that should be revered. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One-Hundred Years of Solitude”, the plights of a poor Columbian family and the community that grows around it are portrayed in an extremely realistic light. Death, labor, lost love, war, political strife, hunger, disease, etc. make up a majority of the work and are described in painstaking detail. The reason for the ‘magic’ (ex. Characters float into sky, etc.) is to define the struggles of the lower class / non Euro-North American against the struggles of the bourgeoisie. Like these ‘other’ writers, the bourgeoisie used realism as the crucial aesthetic of the middle class. The dialectic difference however, lies in the bourgeoisie’s mistrust of mythology and complete faith in science and progress. Writers like Marquez or Rushdie try to show the only way the narrative can achieve any power, through unexplained happenings and sublime intervention. I understood the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It framed the characters problems within a context outside the rational Western tradition. It showed the fundamental difference between the two competing narratives and it also demonstrated an unwillingness to be a part of Western mainstream modernism. Shalimar the Clown does have instances of ‘magic’ and ‘realism’, but it is difficult to see the connection between the two. The problem lies in the fact that a lot of the story takes place in America, where the magic of Kashmir fades into outright gritty realism. Shalimar’s birth and boyhood definitely have the trapping of magical realism found in Marquez. Death, war, etc. are paired with serendipitous, spiritual events that have no basis in reality. As Shalimar gets older, the magic seems to vanish making it more of a mindset than an actual way of claiming narrative validity for an underrepresented voice. From my point of view, Rushdie is making Muslims look like they are stuck in the past. Instead of claiming a narrative that deviates from the hegemony of the West, it endorses realism. This would not be a problem if the story had not exposed the 'magic' as a delusion. -Corey Scibilia
Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of today’s class discussion (to me at least), was when Dr. Akman mentioned that Shalimar the Clown was portrayed as a stereotypical Islamic terrorist. Although I admit I haven’t finished the first half of the novel yet—I’m only just starting the chapter centering on Max—I didn’t interpret Shalimar’s actions within the first chapter of the novel as acts of terrorism. Perhaps, as the novel unravels and more is revealed about Shalimar’s transformation from Boonyi’s loving husband to Max’s killer, Shalimar will become more of a terrorist-type figure. However, I didn’t see that portrayal within the first two chapters of the novel.
To me, Shalimar’s actions seem more like a quiet act of revenge on a man who has taken everything away from him, than an outright act of terrorism. When I think of terrorism, I think of 9/11, the London and Madrid train bombings, etc.—acts that purposefully hurt or killed large groups of innocent citizens. Shalimar’s act of revenge by killing Max was a solitary one—and although murder is never really justifiable, especially in real life—it is somewhat understandable. Max had an affair with Boonyi, Shalimar’s wife, and impregnated her. While Boonyi is just as much at fault (if not more so) for the affair as Max is, I felt myself sympathizing with Shalimar. Who wouldn’t want to take revenge on the person your spouse has cheated on you with?
However, I was somewhat confused when I realized the extent of Shalimar’s past with Max. Twenty-four years have passed since Boonyi’s affair with Max and India’s birth, and yet it’s clear that Max either recognized Shalimar immediately or discovered his identity shortly after hiring him as a chauffer. After Shalimar hands Max his resignation, Max is “shaken” (31) and admits that he “knew the village [Shalimar] came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past” (31). My question is why would Max hire Shalimar if he recognized him? Why would Max let someone so close to him, when he knew Shalimar might try to take revenge for the affair? Max must have realized that death was one possible outcome for hiring Shalimar. Did Max have some sort of death wish? Hopefully the second half of the novel will illuminate some of these inconsistencies.
Although Salman Rushdie is from India himself, there is a certain aspect of orientalism in his method of characterization. India, the illegitimate daughter of a Kashmiri woman and a French-American Ambassador, is portrayed as having two very distinct sides. Her American self is rational and controlled. “She presented herself,” Rushdie writes, “as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated, calm. She spoke with an English accent. In her behavior she was not heated but cool…It was the only version that anyone in America…had ever seen” (3). India was not born with these traits, the author makes clear, but rather worked hard to cultivate them. Rushdie suggests that they are somehow inherently Western, especially when he inserts the fact that she has an English accent into a list of qualities otherwise based on personality.
On the other hand, India is ashamed of the part of herself that Rushdie connects with the East. For example, she dislikes her name because “she didn’t want to be…excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World” (5-6). Although we must take into account that Rushdie is creating a character and not necessarily expressing his own views, the contrast between the adjectives associated with India and those associated with America are blatantly orientalist. The East is associated with India’s history as a “problem child.” She had little self control and even in the present suffers from terrible nightmares and hallucinations. In her sleep she speaks in tongues that sound like a mixture of Arabic and Klingon, unintelligible but nevertheless a noise of “death’s head ugliness” (1). In this description, Rushdie not only associates a major Eastern language with ugliness, but also compares it to the language of the ultimate “other,” space aliens. It is also significant that India’s mother, from which her “Eastern” heritage comes, conceived India out of wedlock and became a scandal to be covered up, much like India struggles to tame the “wild” part of her personality that she associates with her Eastern self. India’s character is one in which Indian, American, and French identities come together within a single person. Like Leo Africanus, she poses the perfect opportunity for the author to make a nuanced statement about the common human traits that underlie all cultures, regardless of their geographic origin. However, unlike Amin Maalouf, Rushdie separates the Indian from the Western within his main character. Furthermore, the “Indian” part of the ambassador’s daughter is the part that, at least in the first half of the book, she chooses to rep
Salman Rushdie, a British-Indian author is an individual who has been displaced from this original home. After the release of his novel The Satanic Verses , Rushdie was forced into a period of exile for 9 years after having fatwa declared on him. Shalimar the Clown, written after this period, seems to deal with identity issues that may arise from being displaced.
Many characters in the section ‘India’ seem to be out of place or not at home. The housing facility India lives in is home to an array of people who you wouldn’t think belonged in Los Angeles. In particular, India describes the old women who sit on their balconies all day, “…the old women lamented the mysterious destinies that had stranded them here, halfway across the world from their points of origin”. Olga Simeonovna is the buildings manger/superintendent and is a practitioner of potato magic, again someone seemingly out of place in modern L.A. Perhaps because it is a large city in the United States, L.A. seems to be the perfect place for displaced people to go. “The city had no focal point., he professed hugely to admire. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it a true democratic city of the future”(21). The way the city is described is more modern and less structured than the other settlement of focus later in the novel, a village in Kashmir. For whatever reason, many displaced people seem to be in Los Angeles from a wide range of places. This diverse clustering of people seems interesting but is not comforting to them as it results in a lack of identity. “Everywhere was now part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people”(37). The lack of structure described in L.A. could be related to the lack of an identifiable identity in people displaced there.
I was rather disappointed in Salman Rushdie after our discussion in class even though when I first started reading Shalimar the Clown I found significance in the novel. I thought that to a certain degree Salman Rushdie did a good job of turning the West’s orientalist view of the East onto itself and purpose that the East does not break down to the few perceptions the West has imposed. However, in class we read the article written by Rushdie which completely contradicts any of the break down of orientalist binaries that are found in the novel. He uses every stereotype about Muslims and Islam to prove a point that is profoundly reckless and emphasizes the orientalist binary. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie emphasizes that “there is no Hindu-Mulim issue” (110) and that these two different cultures are no only able to exist side by side but were able to flourish in a successful manner. Max Ophlus comes into a multi-religious culture that had been living in “long years of communal harmony” (113). This image of the East, though the accurate of depictions of the East’s history of coexistence, is rarely presented in literature. Instead the East is depicted as a hateful region with only hatred for all the non-Muslims “infidels” [1] and who “blame outsiders…for all the ills of Muslim societies” [1] as Rushdie talks about Muslims in his article. In the novel Max Ophlus is presented as a marriage breaking Western ambassador who is allowed into Boonyi’s society without opposition. The West isn’t shown, as in most cases, as the savior of all that is not Western and instead destroys a marriage, a very significant aspect of culture. It is only after he and Boonyi have the affair that he is met with disrespect and resistance. The representation of the West in this light dismantles the typical orientalist illustration of the West as a region devoid of all that is “wrong” with the East. This is a great sentiment, however, then in Rushdie’s article he depicts Muslims as a people with certain “loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over – “Westoxicated” – by the liberal Western-style way of life” [1]. Salman Rushdie further contradicts his own writing by the depiction of Max who finds that the “modern obsession with intimacy”(22) not to his taste. He then uses the discomfort with the over sexualization of society as an accusation of Muslim’s “loathing of modern society in general” [1]. I don’t understand the point of breaking away from the orientalist view of the East if one truly believes all of those stereotypes and uses all of them, and more, to attack an entire religion. The contradictions between the book and article make it hard to take either, or the author, seriously.
Dichotomies in Shalimar the Clown By Kristen Fisher When I first began to read Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie I was quite intrigued by the story about India and her father, Max Ophuls, the American ambassador for the country of the same name. Rushdie presents India as a 24-year-old girl living a life of luxury in California; despite her Eastern origins she longs to keep a distance from her roots and instead become fully immersed in the West. I was first intrigued by India since I could somewhat sympathize with her as a young woman struggling to find a place for herself in the world. But after our discussion about Salman Rushdie in class today, which revealed his negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslim nations after 9/11, I began to reinterpret the character of India and the attitudes she holds towards the East and West. As I read through the few pages in which India is first introduced to readers, I quickly realized that India is not proud of her Eastern heritage and instead is horrified with being associated with the Eastern world. She explains that it “felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial,” two terms that quickly reminded me of the concept of Orientalism (5). During my first reading I felt I could understand that a young girl may not feel truly connected with her home country but rereading these earlier pages I was struck by India’s disgust. Rushdie almost looks to force readers to accept the dichotomies between the East and the West that have come to be accepted as truths in the post 9/11 world. Rushdie has India associate the East with terms such as, “vast,” “excessive,” “vulgar,” “explosive,” “ancient” and “mystical” (5-6). In contrast he has India define the desired Western world as being “disciplined,” “groomed.” “irreligious,” “understated” and “calm” (6). This section of text, filled with a multitude of Orientalist contradictions that have become so commonplace in the 21st century, reveals why there has been so much tension and misunderstanding between the East and the West. Rushdie is a well-known and respected author of the Western world, yet he endorses the treatment of the East as the “other.” Overall, I was shocked that upon my first reading of these two pages I did not notice these stark terms and comparisons between the East and the West. Yet, it sadly seems to illustrate the extent to which these terms do not shock American or Western audiences while simultaneously reveal how these stereotypical beliefs can be found endorsed in anything, even in well-respected fiction. As I continue reading the second half of this novel I feel more alerted to questioning what is said and the messages being sent to readers as we learn more about the story of Max, Shalimar and Boonyi.
Something I found rather interesting about the character of India was that she spoke Arabic when she slept; so often, in fact, that multiple lovers commented on it, causing her to record herself, “in a spirit of research.” The language is described as “both familiar and alien,” and it is admitted that she was frightened by the words nonetheless. I found this to be a rather mystical portrayal of India; she could not escape her Arabic heritage, and though she was taken from her mother at birth and raised in Britain, she still could speak Arabic as though she were familiar with it. It seems almost like a sort of magic; also like magic is Olga Volga, who was a practitioner of “potato sorcery.” Olga was from Astrakhan, not the Middle East, but she was not white and is portrayed as a very traditional, supernatural figure. These magical inclusions in the book seem a little Orientalist to me. It is also made clear to the reader that India hated her name; she wanted a popular American name, and did not like the connotations that her name held. She was a socialite, and tried very hard to distance herself from her Middle Eastern heritage; though she does consider paradise and Kashmir to be synonymous. This is extremely Orientalist; someone from the East desperate to be westernized, and the East itself being referred to as a traditional paradise, as an enchanting place, rather than just a conglomeration of countries. "Shalimar the Clown" was the first book that Salman Rushdie wrote after the terrorist attacks on September 11. In class, we read an article that he wrote that was published in The New York Times, and he put Islam in a shockingly negative light. We discussed how it is possible that Rushdie wrote the article in an attempt to prove his Westernization to the public; I feel that this novel is just another example of his Orientalist viewpoints.
When I started reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, I was struck by the representation of female and male sexuality throughout the first section, “India”. In the first few pages the readership is immediately acquainted with not only a major plot point of the novel, namely the death of the ambassador Max Olphus, but also the sexuality of the main protagonist India. Immediately we are introduced to India’s frustration with her sexual partners and her sexuality when the narrator states, “…until her father’s death she was not an easy woman to sleep with, though she was a woman with whom men wanted to sleep. The pressure of men’s desires were tiresome to her. The pressure of her own desires was for the most part unrelieved” (4).
Our first impression of her is that she is generally unromantic about her sexual relationships, especially when we learn that she “settled on an average fellow” who we later discover to be a neighbor of hers. India describes her affair with him in a negative and pragmatic way when she says “It had probably been a mistake to have sex with him but he was undeniably attractive in an average sort of corn-fed white boy way and he had caught her at a susceptible time” (35). Even though she describes their relationship as ‘love’, there a certain sarcasm and pessimism in the narrator’s tone that implies she is not romantically attached to him. The word ‘love’ transforms into more of an attack than an infatuation when he describes it as “…coming after her” (34). The narrator even goes as far as to imply that she is threatened by her neighbor when he says “She had begun to think she would have to move house to escape this inescapably claustrophobic assault” (34). This passage makes me question whether or not Rushdie is asking us to see India’s sexuality and sexual experiences as submissive rather than consensual, or instinctual rather than a romantic inclination. Is this a social commentary on the status of women in India? After reading the news article that we discussed in class, I suspect that this may be the case, primarily because of his orientalist perspective of the status of women in the East.
There also seems to be a very sexual imagery and eroticism between India and her father. Though there is no sexual relationship between them, we get the impression that Max is physically attracted to India when he encounters a woman that resembles her and her mother. We also learn that India is sexually aroused by the genetic link between herself and her father. In one example we see more of India’s sexuality when she describes her father as youthful and strong-willed. Rushdie uses sexual imagery when he describes how she, “loved him for that will, felt it like a sword within herself, sheathed in her body, waiting” (16). Although there is no incest between them, Rushdie does not shy away from sexualizing their relationship.
Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown is a particularly interesting novel in that it revels in paradoxes and contradictions. Almost all of the characters in the novel seem to realize and be disturbed by the fact that things are not always what they seem, and that one event, person, or thing can have multiple and contradictory meanings. We see this theme taking shape as early as page 21, when India is thinking about her father, Max Ophuls: “He was never more hidden than when he seemed most open,” (21). A few pages later there is a complex commentary on the state of the modern world, ending with the line “Morality and immorality, the beatified and the corrupted, walked towards cameras, hand in hand, and in love,” (24). The idea that it is not only difficult to separate good from evil, but perhaps inherently impossible, is something that India in particular struggles with in this first chapter.
ReplyDeleteThe same idea of the paradoxical seems, however, to transcend time and space, because in the next section, Boonyi, similar contradictions are present and disruptive in the lives of the characters. “The shadow planets existed without actually existing” (45), goes the legend that Pyarelal Kaul teaches to the younger generation and which pervades the culture. The ubiquitous nature of contradiction and paradox throughout Shalimar the Clown is very important to notice and analyze. Although Rushdie often puts these contradictions in the novel so that they appear to be some sort of un-solvable cosmic joke inherent in the world, I think that it also speaks volumes to the personal identities and struggles of the characters. Each of the main characters are trying to establish themselves as whole, coherent beings existing in the world of chaos around them, put continually run up against obstacles within themselves and in the outside world which prevent this. Ultimately I think that the novel is about the characters’ struggle to come to terms with their own identities and map out a place for themselves in the world.
Dia Seskin
ReplyDelete"Shalimar The Clown": Names, Identity & Setting
Upon reading the first half of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown, I began to really enjoy the novel after getting through the first section, and a few things distinctly stood out to me. I really admired the way the novel surprisingly begins set in Los Angeles, given that every other text we have read has taken place in the East. The descriptions of Los Angeles were exquisite in that they were able to capture the city in way that portrayed it as seemingly exploited and emphasized the cultural contrasts. In a sense, so far throughout the novel many aspects of Western life is set right next to the ways of the East. On page 22 I found the description of Los Angeles’ provocative society particularly interesting, “An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning very trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires”. As the page continues, Max Ophuls a former ambassador even goes on to attempt to admire the city’s “strip malls for their neon and chain stores for their ubiquity; when he declined to criticize the produce on sale in the farmers’ markets…the bananas made of pulped paper, the odorless flowers”.
The next theme I found heavily emphasized was the conflict of names and the ability of characters to frequently change them. In addition to this, the narrative of the novel is unique in that it is highly conscious of events that are about to take place, and of events that have already taken place by distancing the reader and clueing them into specific moments. This is all done through an extensive and overly descriptive use of language, creating a sense of magical realism. We are aware of many of the characters, and yet we are not fully aware of who they are until the story begins to unfold. Shalimar’s character is illustrated in the first chapter, but it is not until page 50 that we discover he has chosen this name for himself in honor of his lover Boonyi. At first we understand his character as Shalimar, then Noman, then his identity once again changes to “Shalimar the assassin”. Furthermore, Boonyi has chosen this name for herself, and can be considered to be a similar character to India given that both tragically lost their mothers to childbirth. India as well continually comments on how she despises her name, due to the fact that she was named this solely because India was where she was conceived. In the past novels we have read for the class it was undeniably important to look into the significance of names of the various characters, however I feel that throughout Shalimar The Clown, it is crucial to take them into account. Each character’s name is specifically tailored to the character whether it holds a double meaning, or discloses something about a character’s traits and overall persona.
Jeanne Magnetti
ReplyDeleteInternational Politics and Alphabet Soup
In Shalimar the Clown , Max Ophuls finds himself in the middle of negotiations between India and Pakistan, as facilitated by America and several European nations of the UN. This incident is marked by the emergence of an absurd number of acronyms. Max notes that “mastering the language of unpronounceable acronyms… was the true lingua franca of the subcontinent’s political class” (188). He is surrounded by a copious number of initial bearing programs such as a “fuel exchange program (FEP); Pakistan would export its gas (PG) to India and India would send coal (IC) to Pakistan…He further proposed that the two nations cooperate over hydroelectric and irrigation projects (HAIP) in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Tista river system (GBTRS, or GABTRIS). He spoke to the Indian government minister for planning and social work (GOIMPSW or MINPLASOC)…He encouraged his old pal the minister for foreign affairs, GOIMFA Swaran Singh, to send out a feeler to his GOP counterpart concerning the possibility of back channel arms limitation talks (BALT). Indira Gandhi was settling in as GOIPM aka MADAM….America had been infected by a Western strain of the South Asian disease of acronymical initialitis. JFK, RFK, MLK, and POTUS of course was LBJ and UNSGUT was the secretary-general of the UN, U Thant.” (188). This circus culminates humorously in Max’s confusion over what the word ‘schmuck’ stands for “Ah…Sabatoge of Cooperative….what? Harmony Motivated Undertakings Concerning Kashimar?” (189). This untidy jumble of titles and programs causes the negotiations between India and Pakistan to no longer be meaningful or referential. By creating such a baffling few pages of meaningless abbreviations, Rushdie points out one of the sources of the problem with International Conflict. Somewhere in the tangle of politicians seeking to gain profit and influence through some official sounding programs and titles, nations stop communicating. In the novel, both the governments of India and Pakistan agree that “we can’t go on letting our young men perish like this” (189), but neither nation can negotiate the maze of petty politics and find the problem at the center. This problem that Rushdie points out is not only applicable to India and Pakistan but occurs in every organized government at every level.
Rachel Reff
ReplyDeleteThe Real Importance of the Character Max Ophuls
04/09/13
In Rushdie’s Salimar the Clown, the man who is assassinated in the story is the U.S. ambassador of India, Max Ophuls. In the story Max is a man who lived in France because his parents were killed in the Nazi’s concentration camps. He marries a British aristocrat and moves to London. When Max gets Boonyi pregnant, the child is taken to London and later to the U.S. It is interesting to note that there is a man in real life named Max Ophuls that too was a Jewish German and left Germany during the war for fear of being killed. He fled to France and when France fell to Germany later moved to the U.S. Is the real Max Ophuls supposed to represent the fictional Max Ophuls? The fictional Max could be portrayed through the real Max because they are both men in the same time frame and same countries. Or is the real Max portraying Rushdie himself? The real Max was constantly fleeing countries for the risk of his life just as Rushdie has had to do. The real Max Ophuls also was a filmmaker, which shows the comparison that Rushdie and him are more alike because they both create a fantasy for others. In which Rushdie could fantasize about Max Ophuls life.
Comparison of India and Boonyi
ReplyDeleteThe first two sections of Shalimar the Clown, India and Boonyi, are very different in structure and style. To start, India centers around the ambassador's and Boonyi's daughter, also named India, and revolves around the mystery surrounding her life and the lack of knowledge she possesses. While India is firm in her opinion that she is not like the country she is named after, the book's writing seems to suggest that she is shrouded in ignorance and tucked away so that she is not knowledgeable of her family. One theme that permeates India's section of the novel is mystery--the mystery of her nightmares, the mystery of Shalimar the Clown, the mystery of India's mother's death, the mystery of Max Olphus himself. Nothing at all is explained or revealed and only problems or puzzles litter this section. It ends with India having full knowledge what result might come from her father contacting her at her residence but no way of knowing why or how said solution--her father's death--occurred. She handles it by hiding in her room, sitting alone, ignoring everything, still keeping the theme of mystery present.
Boonyi has a very different tone from India. In stark contrast to the mystery of India, Boonyi is quite exotic and mystical, often referencing gods and other deities to explain all sorts of ideas that now have scientific basis. The aura of exoticism present within Boonyi acts as a way to foreshadow Boonyi's alluring quality in which her relationship with Max Olphus is consummated. We learn some things about the mysteries presented within the first section of the novel but there is still not solid, factual evidence to declare these mysteries solved. While India's chapter is representative of a more Western environment, Boonyi's chapter is indicative of a very stereotypically Eastern setting, playing into an Orientalist perspective. I am not sure what Rushdie's technique was in juxtaposing the two chapters, or to write a text that is Orientalist, but the contrast between the two plays into the subject material of the novel itself.
In class today, we were given a bit of a taste of what the "real" Salman Rushdie might be like. It is difficult to say if he is really the hero many claim him to be or not, but one thing is for sure, at least, in my mind: Shalimar the Clown is not the work of a literary genius. India, the first introduced character, is an extremely sensual but conflicted to the point of being mentally ill, is almost too obviously an allegory for the country of India itself, a beautiful, sensual country torn apart by ideological conflict. But it's too obvious a parallel, to the point of being cheesy. India doesn't come across as a real character, but some distanced, poetic being floating in an ether of abstractions and metaphors. In fact, because of Rushdie's overly-ornate, supposed "mastery" of the English language, none of the characters come across as real people. Instead, one can tell they exist solely in Rushdie's literature, as mouthpieces for Rushdie's poetic, but ultimately superficial, prose.
ReplyDeleteEllen Walpole
ReplyDelete“Shalimar the Clown” – Week 1
April 9, 2013
The Role of Women and Some Foreshadowing
While reading the first half of Salman Rushdie’s novel, I found myself enjoying reading a more present day novel. The opening setting of India in Los Angeles immediately made it more relatable for me for some reason. I suppose I’ve gotten used to reading novels set in the East in class, so an American setting now, ironically enough, seems “exotic.” I am also appreciating the strong female characterization of India. It is rare that we have read about strong women characters, so India seems to be a nice change of pace.
Also, the character of Boonyi has proved interesting to read. On the night she went to meet her lover, she was the one who took charge and had sex with him when he started to second guess himself and her state of being. Maybe because it is set in a more current setting, but women definitely seem to play a larger role than in the novels we have previously read. Not only did I see foreshadowing, but I also saw unexpected emotions from Shalimar after they had sex and he said “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also” (61).
Since it was previously revealed that Shalimar was a trained assassin and that Boonyi was his one and only love, I assumed she would have something to do with his dark and downward spiral in violence. I also picked up on some foreshadowing when Firdaus Noman, Shalimar’s mother, began to feel uneasy at the end of her pregnancy. When she felt unwell she said that “…the person that’s giving me the shivers right now is still inside here” (72). She was talking about her belly of course, and went on to say that “even before his birth, her son, whom everyone loved the minute he was born, and whose nature was the sweetest, gentlest and most open of any human being in Pachigam, had started scaring her half to death” (72).
It is clear that Shalimar’s happy and innocent childhood came to a quick halt and turned him into the trained killer he is in the present day story line.
Salman Rushdie & the New York Times
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the New York Times article in class today I have to admit, it was really a discouraging tone to begin this novel on. The entire article was filled with highly charged political jargon, the type that George Orwell describes as using a lot of words without actually saying much of anything. It is a type of specialized language used to confuse the lay-person who is unfamiliar with it. The purpose is, for lack of a better expression, to "sound" intelligent, while simultaneously expressing ignorant and/or incorrect ideas.
Another issue I took with the article we read in class today was the lack of source citation. Sure, this was an "opinion" column, but some things must be considered even in an opinion column. The New York Times is a major source of news for literally millions of people. This should really be considered when allowing someone to post slanderous material without source citation. Perhaps this is a call to how much emphasis should be placed on journals and magazines especially in regards to what they choose to publish.
Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown” is described as a work of ‘magical realism’ on sites like Amazon and Wikipedia. It’s true that non-Euro-North American writers have used this style of narrative for decades. Although it’s used for different reasons, its main goal is to embrace the negative description, classification, or binary of a specific people and turn it into something that should be revered.
ReplyDeleteIn Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One-Hundred Years of Solitude”, the plights of a poor Columbian family and the community that grows around it are portrayed in an extremely realistic light. Death, labor, lost love, war, political strife, hunger, disease, etc. make up a majority of the work and are described in painstaking detail. The reason for the ‘magic’ (ex. Characters float into sky, etc.) is to define the struggles of the lower class / non Euro-North American against the struggles of the bourgeoisie. Like these ‘other’ writers, the bourgeoisie used realism as the crucial aesthetic of the middle class. The dialectic difference however, lies in the bourgeoisie’s mistrust of mythology and complete faith in science and progress. Writers like Marquez or Rushdie try to show the only way the narrative can achieve any power, through unexplained happenings and sublime intervention.
I understood the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It framed the characters problems within a context outside the rational Western tradition. It showed the fundamental difference between the two competing narratives and it also demonstrated an unwillingness to be a part of Western mainstream modernism.
Shalimar the Clown does have instances of ‘magic’ and ‘realism’, but it is difficult to see the connection between the two. The problem lies in the fact that a lot of the story takes place in America, where the magic of Kashmir fades into outright gritty realism. Shalimar’s birth and boyhood definitely have the trapping of magical realism found in Marquez. Death, war, etc. are paired with serendipitous, spiritual events that have no basis in reality. As Shalimar gets older, the magic seems to vanish making it more of a mindset than an actual way of claiming narrative validity for an underrepresented voice. From my point of view, Rushdie is making Muslims look like they are stuck in the past. Instead of claiming a narrative that deviates from the hegemony of the West, it endorses realism. This would not be a problem if the story had not exposed the 'magic' as a delusion.
-Corey Scibilia
Terrorism and Revenge
ReplyDeletePerhaps one of the most surprising aspects of today’s class discussion (to me at least), was when Dr. Akman mentioned that Shalimar the Clown was portrayed as a stereotypical Islamic terrorist. Although I admit I haven’t finished the first half of the novel yet—I’m only just starting the chapter centering on Max—I didn’t interpret Shalimar’s actions within the first chapter of the novel as acts of terrorism. Perhaps, as the novel unravels and more is revealed about Shalimar’s transformation from Boonyi’s loving husband to Max’s killer, Shalimar will become more of a terrorist-type figure. However, I didn’t see that portrayal within the first two chapters of the novel.
To me, Shalimar’s actions seem more like a quiet act of revenge on a man who has taken everything away from him, than an outright act of terrorism. When I think of terrorism, I think of 9/11, the London and Madrid train bombings, etc.—acts that purposefully hurt or killed large groups of innocent citizens. Shalimar’s act of revenge by killing Max was a solitary one—and although murder is never really justifiable, especially in real life—it is somewhat understandable. Max had an affair with Boonyi, Shalimar’s wife, and impregnated her. While Boonyi is just as much at fault (if not more so) for the affair as Max is, I felt myself sympathizing with Shalimar. Who wouldn’t want to take revenge on the person your spouse has cheated on you with?
However, I was somewhat confused when I realized the extent of Shalimar’s past with Max. Twenty-four years have passed since Boonyi’s affair with Max and India’s birth, and yet it’s clear that Max either recognized Shalimar immediately or discovered his identity shortly after hiring him as a chauffer. After Shalimar hands Max his resignation, Max is “shaken” (31) and admits that he “knew the village [Shalimar] came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past” (31). My question is why would Max hire Shalimar if he recognized him? Why would Max let someone so close to him, when he knew Shalimar might try to take revenge for the affair? Max must have realized that death was one possible outcome for hiring Shalimar. Did Max have some sort of death wish? Hopefully the second half of the novel will illuminate some of these inconsistencies.
India: A Character Divided
ReplyDeleteAlthough Salman Rushdie is from India himself, there is a certain aspect of orientalism in his method of characterization. India, the illegitimate daughter of a Kashmiri woman and a French-American Ambassador, is portrayed as having two very distinct sides. Her American self is rational and controlled. “She presented herself,” Rushdie writes, “as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated, calm. She spoke with an English accent. In her behavior she was not heated but cool…It was the only version that anyone in America…had ever seen” (3). India was not born with these traits, the author makes clear, but rather worked hard to cultivate them. Rushdie suggests that they are somehow inherently Western, especially when he inserts the fact that she has an English accent into a list of qualities otherwise based on personality.
On the other hand, India is ashamed of the part of herself that Rushdie connects with the East. For example, she dislikes her name because “she didn’t want to be…excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World” (5-6). Although we must take into account that Rushdie is creating a character and not necessarily expressing his own views, the contrast between the adjectives associated with India and those associated with America are blatantly orientalist. The East is associated with India’s history as a “problem child.” She had little self control and even in the present suffers from terrible nightmares and hallucinations. In her sleep she speaks in tongues that sound like a mixture of Arabic and Klingon, unintelligible but nevertheless a noise of “death’s head ugliness” (1). In this description, Rushdie not only associates a major Eastern language with ugliness, but also compares it to the language of the ultimate “other,” space aliens. It is also significant that India’s mother, from which her “Eastern” heritage comes, conceived India out of wedlock and became a scandal to be covered up, much like India struggles to tame the “wild” part of her personality that she associates with her Eastern self. India’s character is one in which Indian, American, and French identities come together within a single person. Like Leo Africanus, she poses the perfect opportunity for the author to make a nuanced statement about the common human traits that underlie all cultures, regardless of their geographic origin. However, unlike Amin Maalouf, Rushdie separates the Indian from the Western within his main character. Furthermore, the “Indian” part of the ambassador’s daughter is the part that, at least in the first half of the book, she chooses to rep
Identity of displaced people
ReplyDeleteSalman Rushdie, a British-Indian author is an individual who has been displaced from this original home. After the release of his novel The Satanic Verses , Rushdie was forced into a period of exile for 9 years after having fatwa declared on him. Shalimar the Clown, written after this period, seems to deal with identity issues that may arise from being displaced.
Many characters in the section ‘India’ seem to be out of place or not at home. The housing facility India lives in is home to an array of people who you wouldn’t think belonged in Los Angeles. In particular, India describes the old women who sit on their balconies all day, “…the old women lamented the mysterious destinies that had stranded them here, halfway across the world from their points of origin”. Olga Simeonovna is the buildings manger/superintendent and is a practitioner of potato magic, again someone seemingly out of place in modern L.A. Perhaps because it is a large city in the United States, L.A. seems to be the perfect place for displaced people to go. “The city had no focal point., he professed hugely to admire. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it a true democratic city of the future”(21). The way the city is described is more modern and less structured than the other settlement of focus later in the novel, a village in Kashmir. For whatever reason, many displaced people seem to be in Los Angeles from a wide range of places. This diverse clustering of people seems interesting but is not comforting to them as it results in a lack of identity.
“Everywhere was now part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people”(37). The lack of structure described in L.A. could be related to the lack of an identifiable identity in people displaced there.
I was rather disappointed in Salman Rushdie after our discussion in class even though when I first started reading Shalimar the Clown I found significance in the novel. I thought that to a certain degree Salman Rushdie did a good job of turning the West’s orientalist view of the East onto itself and purpose that the East does not break down to the few perceptions the West has imposed. However, in class we read the article written by Rushdie which completely contradicts any of the break down of orientalist binaries that are found in the novel. He uses every stereotype about Muslims and Islam to prove a point that is profoundly reckless and emphasizes the orientalist binary.
ReplyDeleteIn Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie emphasizes that “there is no Hindu-Mulim issue” (110) and that these two different cultures are no only able to exist side by side but were able to flourish in a successful manner. Max Ophlus comes into a multi-religious culture that had been living in “long years of communal harmony” (113). This image of the East, though the accurate of depictions of the East’s history of coexistence, is rarely presented in literature. Instead the East is depicted as a hateful region with only hatred for all the non-Muslims “infidels” [1] and who “blame outsiders…for all the ills of Muslim societies” [1] as Rushdie talks about Muslims in his article.
In the novel Max Ophlus is presented as a marriage breaking Western ambassador who is allowed into Boonyi’s society without opposition. The West isn’t shown, as in most cases, as the savior of all that is not Western and instead destroys a marriage, a very significant aspect of culture. It is only after he and Boonyi have the affair that he is met with disrespect and resistance. The representation of the West in this light dismantles the typical orientalist illustration of the West as a region devoid of all that is “wrong” with the East. This is a great sentiment, however, then in Rushdie’s article he depicts Muslims as a people with certain “loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over – “Westoxicated” – by the liberal Western-style way of life” [1].
Salman Rushdie further contradicts his own writing by the depiction of Max who finds that the “modern obsession with intimacy”(22) not to his taste. He then uses the discomfort with the over sexualization of society as an accusation of Muslim’s “loathing of modern society in general” [1].
I don’t understand the point of breaking away from the orientalist view of the East if one truly believes all of those stereotypes and uses all of them, and more, to attack an entire religion. The contradictions between the book and article make it hard to take either, or the author, seriously.
Dichotomies in Shalimar the Clown
ReplyDeleteBy Kristen Fisher
When I first began to read Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie I was quite intrigued by the story about India and her father, Max Ophuls, the American ambassador for the country of the same name. Rushdie presents India as a 24-year-old girl living a life of luxury in California; despite her Eastern origins she longs to keep a distance from her roots and instead become fully immersed in the West. I was first intrigued by India since I could somewhat sympathize with her as a young woman struggling to find a place for herself in the world. But after our discussion about Salman Rushdie in class today, which revealed his negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslim nations after 9/11, I began to reinterpret the character of India and the attitudes she holds towards the East and West.
As I read through the few pages in which India is first introduced to readers, I quickly realized that India is not proud of her Eastern heritage and instead is horrified with being associated with the Eastern world. She explains that it “felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial,” two terms that quickly reminded me of the concept of Orientalism (5). During my first reading I felt I could understand that a young girl may not feel truly connected with her home country but rereading these earlier pages I was struck by India’s disgust. Rushdie almost looks to force readers to accept the dichotomies between the East and the West that have come to be accepted as truths in the post 9/11 world. Rushdie has India associate the East with terms such as, “vast,” “excessive,” “vulgar,” “explosive,” “ancient” and “mystical” (5-6). In contrast he has India define the desired Western world as being “disciplined,” “groomed.” “irreligious,” “understated” and “calm” (6).
This section of text, filled with a multitude of Orientalist contradictions that have become so commonplace in the 21st century, reveals why there has been so much tension and misunderstanding between the East and the West. Rushdie is a well-known and respected author of the Western world, yet he endorses the treatment of the East as the “other.” Overall, I was shocked that upon my first reading of these two pages I did not notice these stark terms and comparisons between the East and the West. Yet, it sadly seems to illustrate the extent to which these terms do not shock American or Western audiences while simultaneously reveal how these stereotypical beliefs can be found endorsed in anything, even in well-respected fiction. As I continue reading the second half of this novel I feel more alerted to questioning what is said and the messages being sent to readers as we learn more about the story of Max, Shalimar and Boonyi.
Kristen Orr
ReplyDeleteOrientalism in "Shalimar the Clown"
Something I found rather interesting about the character of India was that she spoke Arabic when she slept; so often, in fact, that multiple lovers commented on it, causing her to record herself, “in a spirit of research.” The language is described as “both familiar and alien,” and it is admitted that she was frightened by the words nonetheless. I found this to be a rather mystical portrayal of India; she could not escape her Arabic heritage, and though she was taken from her mother at birth and raised in Britain, she still could speak Arabic as though she were familiar with it. It seems almost like a sort of magic; also like magic is Olga Volga, who was a practitioner of “potato sorcery.” Olga was from Astrakhan, not the Middle East, but she was not white and is portrayed as a very traditional, supernatural figure. These magical inclusions in the book seem a little Orientalist to me.
It is also made clear to the reader that India hated her name; she wanted a popular American name, and did not like the connotations that her name held. She was a socialite, and tried very hard to distance herself from her Middle Eastern heritage; though she does consider paradise and Kashmir to be synonymous. This is extremely Orientalist; someone from the East desperate to be westernized, and the East itself being referred to as a traditional paradise, as an enchanting place, rather than just a conglomeration of countries.
"Shalimar the Clown" was the first book that Salman Rushdie wrote after the terrorist attacks on September 11. In class, we read an article that he wrote that was published in The New York Times, and he put Islam in a shockingly negative light. We discussed how it is possible that Rushdie wrote the article in an attempt to prove his Westernization to the public; I feel that this novel is just another example of his Orientalist viewpoints.
Sexuality in "India"
ReplyDeleteWhen I started reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, I was struck by the representation of female and male sexuality throughout the first section, “India”. In the first few pages the readership is immediately acquainted with not only a major plot point of the novel, namely the death of the ambassador Max Olphus, but also the sexuality of the main protagonist India. Immediately we are introduced to India’s frustration with her sexual partners and her sexuality when the narrator states, “…until her father’s death she was not an easy woman to sleep with, though she was a woman with whom men wanted to sleep. The pressure of men’s desires were tiresome to her. The pressure of her own desires was for the most part unrelieved” (4).
Our first impression of her is that she is generally unromantic about her sexual relationships, especially when we learn that she “settled on an average fellow” who we later discover to be a neighbor of hers. India describes her affair with him in a negative and pragmatic way when she says “It had probably been a mistake to have sex with him but he was undeniably attractive in an average sort of corn-fed white boy way and he had caught her at a susceptible time” (35). Even though she describes their relationship as ‘love’, there a certain sarcasm and pessimism in the narrator’s tone that implies she is not romantically attached to him. The word ‘love’ transforms into more of an attack than an infatuation when he describes it as “…coming after her” (34). The narrator even goes as far as to imply that she is threatened by her neighbor when he says “She had begun to think she would have to move house to escape this inescapably claustrophobic assault” (34). This passage makes me question whether or not Rushdie is asking us to see India’s sexuality and sexual experiences as submissive rather than consensual, or instinctual rather than a romantic inclination. Is this a social commentary on the status of women in India? After reading the news article that we discussed in class, I suspect that this may be the case, primarily because of his orientalist perspective of the status of women in the East.
There also seems to be a very sexual imagery and eroticism between India and her father. Though there is no sexual relationship between them, we get the impression that Max is physically attracted to India when he encounters a woman that resembles her and her mother. We also learn that India is sexually aroused by the genetic link between herself and her father. In one example we see more of India’s sexuality when she describes her father as youthful and strong-willed. Rushdie uses sexual imagery when he describes how she, “loved him for that will, felt it like a sword within herself, sheathed in her body, waiting” (16). Although there is no incest between them, Rushdie does not shy away from sexualizing their relationship.
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