Conclusion
The Enchantress of Florence celebrates neither past nor present, but draws focus on the reciprocal dimension between them. History in this novel is encoded with the author’s narrative treatment and its meanings make sense only when they are decoded by the reading act. Constructed with both the past and present voices, stories in The Enchantress of Florence exhibit the dialogic interactions constituted by the hybrid structures of the speeches and the ambiguity of the story, which are embodied in the characters’ suspended statuses between fact and fiction as well as between subversive and repressive powers. In this interstitial zone, The Enchantress of Florence comes to terms with the past and breaks down the anxiety of influence that literary forefathers create for their descendants.
In this thesis I analyze The Enchantress of Florence through the veins of dialogic discourse. As Bakhtin explains, with different speech types heteroglossia enters the novel and engages in the dialogic activity: “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorečie] can enter the novel”
(Bakhtin 300). The key concept of dialogism then lies in the interactions of the multiplicitous units carried out by heteroglossia. I investigate that the dialogic expression in The Enchantress of Florence appears through the representations of another’s speech, intertextual bouncing and border-crossing.
Refracted Intentions can be manifested in many forms, but I focus on
pseudo-objective and quasi-direct speeches in the parodied history of The Enchantress of Florence. Double-intentioned speeches as such enable parody’s function to critique,
and it is also this dialogic interaction that performs parody’s “double-directionness.”
The characters’ and author’s belief systems are mixed and matched and deliberately confusing in these two kinds of double voiced speeches. But it is also this
double-voicedness that accommodates both the decoder and encoder to communicate.
Furthermore, this encoded text is at the same time context-dependent because its double intentions often come from the author’s socio-ideological background.
Consequently, parodic texts are accessible for the readers and their present intentions while maintaining its tie to history.
Briefly speaking, double-voicedness is structured as one speech, but with multiple intentions. Voices of the author or the ethos the author tries to depict enter characters’ speeches. In reverse, the characters’ intentions can at times disguise themselves as the authorial speech. In this synthesis of voices, the narrator sways between the author’s and the story’s temporal ethos. In The Enchantress of Florence, the narrator sometimes speaks from the sixteenth century’s point of view while at other times he seems to be on the contemporary side, judging the past events and characters. In this regard, dialogism does not promote a static harmony of diverse voices; instead, dialogism describes a unity embodying the competing diversity.
Caryl Emerson explains that there is this warring tendency in Bakhtin’s dialogic analyses: “In his texts words are always competing, doing battle, winning and losing territory” (xxxvii). Dialogism then entails more than dialogues between characters and that between the author and reader. Dialogism includes the political liberalist values; it encourages the existence of a pluralistic world celebrates freedom of
perspectives. Yet, dialogism does not necessary stress on equality. Each voice seeks to dominate one another.
Intertextuality is another representation of dialogism, as intertextuality
essentially juggles two fundamentals. Intertexts come in many forms: fiction and facts,
the novel and history, or even two paradigms—medieval and renaissance. When parody engages two or more texts, it embodies one aspect of dialogism—the “artistic recycling” (Hutcheon 15). In this part of the discussion, I draw focus on the parodied historical events and characters. Akbar and Jodha, the two main characters in both history and this novel, mediate the act of intertextual bouncing between different stylistics. In The Enchantress of Florence, Akbar undergoes an epic transformation, which ironically exposes the epicfication of this historical figure. Jodha, similarly, goes through a further mystification in The Enchantress of Florence. In this novel, Jodha becomes an “almost possible” character who lives only in people’s beliefs.
Jodha lacks autonomy as a result, and eventually gets replaced by another fictionalized female figure—Qara Köz.
As a parody of history, The Enchantress of Florence re-appropriates history not only with the ironic tone, but also with the magic realist approach. Fact and fiction are dependent upon each other. Rushdie’s imagination takes effect on the basis of
historical validity. That is, the freedom of imagination is based upon the precision of historical time and place. When this novel is located in between two ethos and two cultures, it is inevitably a journey of clashing and harmonizing ideologies. The East and West and the medieval and the Renaissance conjure up a world of multiplicity.
The mirage-like depiction of the city Fatehpur Sikri creates a perfect world of dialogue between the fanciful and the real.
In its theme of border-crossing, The Enchantress of Florence establishes a place of ambiguity. The theme of hybridity also takes the forms of the cultural encounter and the suspended state between imagination and reality. The greatest painter in The Enchantress of Florence—Dashwanth becomes subsumed in his own painting while the enchantress Qara Köz freely spreads her magic charm of love across cultures.
These two characters, together with the imagined Queen Jodha, present hybridity with their identity. Their physical hybridity lies in their partly fictional and partly historical background and their conscious hybridity comes from their struggles between striving to gain autonomy and being pressured by the patriarchal system.
In brief, the hybrid voice in speeches, the dialogues between texts and the suspension of disbelief between reality and artifice accomplish the dialogized heteroglossia in The Enchantress of Florence. The result of the dialogic flows is the undecidable statuses of the characters and the novel.
The Enchantress of Florence challenges the canonical status of history with its parodic paradoxes. History is authoritative and it can be religious when there is this urge to represent the past as it truly was. According to Southgate, before
postmodernism and postcolonial concepts arrived on stage, history was deemed impersonal, didactic and moralistic. Although Rushdie’s novels have this tendency to challenge history, it is The Enchantress of Florence that not only personalizes history but also replaces didactic episodes with sexual licentiousness.
As a form commonly viewed as attack on the original texts, parody incorporates more complex relations than mere antagonism. Hutcheon notes one fundamental paradoxical value in parody: “anti-totalizing totalization” ( The Politics of
Postmodernism 63). The same discursive strategy goes to what Hutcheon describes in A Theory of Parody as “authorized transgression” (75). Parody embodies conflicting tendencies to both imitate and critique the main voice. Parody’s rebellious nature challenges the dominant voice and its urge to become dominant forges parody’s paradoxes.
Therefore, “repetition with critical difference,” similarity alongside difference, is the key feature of parody (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 6). Similarity can be found in the direct quotations or literal imitations. Nonetheless, this kind of borrowing in
parody “establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 8).The human race compared across time suggests that there are two temporal as well as cultural entities coming into play. With Akbar’s empire and the enlightened Florence and the world of the sixteenth century in comparison to the contemporary one we live in, the reader finds out the coincidental pattern of human behavior. Yet this mirroring suggests both similarity and difference; it in actuality presents
compatibility of two different entities. The past in The Enchantress of Florence shines light on the contemporary by showing how similar humans behave in ways of
religious beliefs and thirst for power. Nonetheless, the history depicted in this novel also presents a world of ventures and tolerance for imaginations which is in contrast to the present world where Rushdie has encountered ruthless censorship that
“deaden[s] the imagination of people” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 39).
Meanwhile, difference creates a liberating potential, according to Patrick
Schmidt. When the parodic work deconstructs the original work, it creates a space for imagination, for an “alternative use” (Schmidt 17). This feature of parody delimits history from the narrative restrains. Showing historical facts on texts means the inevitable issue of representation, since “any representation of [reality] is bound to be partial and incomplete […]” (Thompson 55). This problem of representation is essential to the postmodern thesis: “The first [postmodern] thesis is that of anti-realism, which maintains that the past cannot be the object of historical
knowledge […]” (Zagorin 13). The past is a separate entity which cannot be wholly obtained. In fact, according to Southgate, all history is ideological because it
inevitably goes through the mediations of perspective and political agenda. History and fiction, therefore, cannot be wholly separate from each other.
Conversely, fictional writing seems to be granted unlimited freedom to distort reality. Yet, as Rushdie believes, fictional representation should not be too dissimilar
to reality, or it might fall in the trap of whim: “Can a work of art grow into anything of value if it has no roots in observable reality?” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 123). Consequently, both historical and fictional writings incorporate elements of truth and untruth.
In the end, through the convergence of imitation and differentiation, parody reveals how mirroring also reveals the existence of artifice. The doppelganger’s existence reveals that of the real, and in turn, alongside the real sits its artificial doppelganger. The critical difference of parody may unfetter the representation of reality, but it also implies the inseparability between any so-called truth and fiction.
Conclusively, The Enchantress of Florence investigates the convoluted entanglement between history and fiction. The ultimate paradox of this novel articulates its desire for both openness and closure that results in the perpetual
reinvention of a fixed text. The interpreted history confronts the reader’s belief system and invites the reader to participate in the hierarchical structure of ideologies. These complex webs of intentions co-create the open-endedness and also its byproduct:
undecidability of the text. Indeterminacy may challenge the hegemonic voices, but it also represents endless suspension and relativizing.