For researchers who are interested in space, city is usually an interesting subject worth their attention and investigation. Compared with rural villages, the city accommodates more people from numerous places and with manifold backgrounds. It usually embodies modern features and traces of its historical development in its structure, architecture, and ways of living. It accommodates people of different backgrounds or features. It demonstrates the governments’ urban planning and manifests its residents’ living experiences. Space is a material, conceptual, empirical and expressional existence, so the city is changed not only by external forces but also with its interaction with time and its users. To understand the city is to discover the relations between things and people because the cityscape is constructed by stratifications of relations, memories and expectations of different periods of time.
Different relations will arouse various responses and consequences, and its users’
memories and expectations always influence the everyday life of each person. The city are used by people of different genders, ethnicities, religions, classes, occupations, etc., and they have their own interpretations, imagination, and expressions of the city.
Sometimes, it is in the collection of different interpretations and imaginations of the city that we can see alternate visions of the city. In other words, the city is like an archive of manifold narratives of different times and from different places. The city congeals so many things in its manifestation of what a city is like that it usually attracts people’s attention. Therefore, the landscape of a city is constructed by stratifications formed in different times and by different communities. Traits of
different historical times will be found in the city, telling stories that might have happened long ago or far away. However, not only are these traits reminiscences of the old times, but they also indicate how the place was lived and was supposed to be lived, in which we see the development of the city.
Unlike the city planners who may see the city from an overall point of view at a certain distance, users of the city are more likely to perceive, conceive and live the city with their own perspectives from a closer and reflective point. As previous discussion on Lefebvre’s representational spaces points out, there is always subversive force from users’ space against the established conceptualization of space.
Endowed with users’ everyday experiences, representational spaces are bound up with
“the lived space of sensations, the imagination, emotions, and meanings incorporated into how we live day by day” (Harvey “space” 130). Instead of directly manipulating or changing the space, users express the discrepancy between the institutionalized knowledge and their everyday life experience. On the other hand, time shapes how we think of the city. The same building will bear manifold significances to different persons because of what we have experienced before individually. Time influences our perception and expression of space, so we have “visions, fantasies, desires, frustrations, memories, dreams and various psychic states” (135) of certain space.
Representational spaces consist of expressions of our current feelings and congeal the past, the present and the future in itself.
According to David Harvey, the figure of a city and the image of utopia have long been intertwined together (Space 156). To some degree, the emergence of cities symbolizes human beings’ efforts or development in gathering things and people so as to efficiently exchange goods and information. It gradually becomes space of progresses and the paradigm of modernity, where people are able to see materials or
concepts that are supported by new technology and embodiment of advanced ideas. In this way, for many people, the city represents the projection of human beings’ futile efforts in the past and their anticipation for the future. Since the city accommodates so many things, people tend to believe that the city will have some space for them. The image of utopia has overlapped the vision of the city, where they are able to turn a new leaf. In Shalimar the Clown, Los Angeles can be interpreted as a counterpart of Pachigam, both of which seem to have opposite features to the other. One is a metropolis in the west while the other is a rural community in the east. However, they share the vision of utopia or paradise. For residents in Pachigam, their paradise has disappeared in two aspects: the smashed landscape of the Kashmiri village destroyed by the Indian troops and the faded spirit of Kashmiriyat after the partition and the pot war. For immigrants in Los Angeles, their paradise is the one they long for.
However, while crossing the ocean to escape from dislocation, poverty, oppression, armies, etc., some of them lose their hope for regaining paradise on the way. The ocean may refer to the sea that separates continents or the barriers that prohibit them from dreaming.
Even though Pachigam and Los Angeles lie in different parts of the world, they find their stories shinning in the other’s histories. Pachigam, which we have examined how it loses its precious landscape and spirit in the previous chapter, actually represents places that have suffered conflicts, wars or terror around the world, and Los Angeles accommodates people from different Pachigams. They are bound with the impact of migration. It is the decision made in Los Angeles that may alter a man in the remote country, and it is the past in these Pachigams that will get involved in their life in Los Angeles. Shalimar the Clown not only describes the destruction of Rushdie’s lost and imaginary homeland, Kashmir, but also puts emphasis on what happens after
the migration to another paradise, a significant issue of the twentieth century. While the sections of Pachigam show us the vision of lost paradise, Los Angeles in the eyes of immigrants discloses the disillusion of the city of angels. Both of them reveal the people’s quest for something disappearing.
In the novel, Los Angeles is portrayed as a capital city “of the billion-dollar industries of film, television and recorded music” (Rushdie, Shalimar 24). It is a city of entertainment, famous for how it produces and promotes images and grasps the audience’s attention around the world. Rushdie employs the well-known features of Los Angeles’ entertainment industries to unravel how this cosmopolitan metropolis is constructed, perceived and experienced. Max’s interview on the talk show is one of the examples. When Max begins his vehement diatribe on the Kashmir issue, the talk-show host only worries about the fact that something outside his living reality will influence the audience rating of his program.
The talk-show host had the feeling that he was watching the drowning of one reality, the reality in which he lived, by a sudden flood from the other side of the world, an alien deluge in response to which his beloved viewers would form a flood of their own, pouring over in the midnight hour of the show’s transmission to the channel where his bitter rival, the other talk-show host, the tall bony gap-toothed from New York, would be dancing in the rain of gold. (27-28)
For the host, Kashmir is only a political issue with no benefits to his audience rating.
There are floods of information and stories coming into the city in a day, but the Kashmir one does not suit the talk show. The talk-show host wants the ambassador’s anecdotes about his stories with many celebrities. “He thanked Max for his fascinating views, guided him courteously to the exit, and then personally supervised
the editing of the Ophuls interview; which he cut, to shreds, to the bone” (28-29). For the audience rating, the host only picks up materials that will interest and entertain his audience so as to make his audience feel comfortable and satisfied despite the fact that the editing may distort the ambassador’s original intention. This is how people edit messages in order to provide comfortable messages. To marginalize or to fabricate how things are actually presented is a way to make all the things seem coherent and comfortable for viewers, especially for those who only prepare to see what they have believed in. To make people firmly believe in the knowledge they produce, some production of meaning must be erased or edited. Therefore, for some people, Rushdie’s words about Islam are the ones that need to be supervised.
In the same way, to produce and promote a positive image of the city, there will also be editing, cutting, zooming in and out, focusing on the materials that will catch people’s attention and deceive the audience’s perception so that we can reinforce the order that people believe it is how we generally live. However, floods from other parts of the world do not just come into the talk show where the host or the producer can do editing. The floods have already arrived and dwelled in the city. Floods of people from those remote lands have blended themselves with the city and have posed challenges or threats to the city. However, in the city which is adroit at producing and representing people’s dreams, people like the host will tend to ignore and manufacture facts, fearing that the reality that they have been used to will be drowned. However, to resist imposed violence or knowledge, we need to rescale our understanding of our living space. As an archive of immigrant stories, Los Angeles in Shalimar the Clown offers a new perspective to look at the spatial representations of the city.
For India/Kashmira, Los Angeles is the city of display and deception, for what she perceives from the city is different from what the city claims to be. The city is no
longer the city of angels since she does not see any angels save people from being trapped in the past and futile efforts. She does not see any guardian spirits appear to save her father from being killed. Her father is assassinated in broad daylight in the so-called city of angels, with maximum security system. His death soon becomes the headlines, one of the memorable events, a potential topic for talk shows, a subject for daily gossips, and then something buried underneath the city’s ground before another striking news comes out. This is Los Angeles. Everything passes so fast and life goes on and on to maintain its supposed order without thinking how the city becomes the one we are living in.
In fact, India/Kashmira’s attitude toward Los Angeles has a lot to do with the loss of her own story. She only possesses scraps of information about her birth land and her Kashmiri mother. She feels that she only has parts of herself. Therefore, she tends to live her life at a certain distance occupied by the absence of her own story and her own will. Unlike her ambassador father, who praises the advances and modern life in Los Angeles, India/Kashmira is like a detached observer and a critic of the city. She is not that close to the city. She does not feel that she fits the city in any aspect, including the weather. She is a woman who “hates good weather, but most of the year the city offers little else” (4). For her, “the long monotonous months of shadowless sunshine and dry, skin-cracking heat” (4) does not provide her with senses of warmness or security. Without much ideas about herself, she can only be India, being forced to leave Kashmir to London and then Los Angeles. When she is merely India, her Kashmiri story, whether in London or in Los Angeles, is silenced and absent. She would be just India if she had no opportunity to connect her past with the present, just like other immigrants from different corners of the world dwelling in the city without being noticed.
In the novel, India/Kashmira pays much attention to the gap between what people think the city should be like and how the city is actually experienced. This city tries to maintain its order and its image as a liberal and cosmopolitan city through foregrounding what is important for such an image of a progressive metropolis and marginalizing what is not. “The dishonest nursery blue of the sky that makes the world look childlike and pure” (5). It is the ostentatious pureness that makes people unable to perceive the illusion fabricated by the city and willing to accept the status quo. People take things happening here for granted. Its residents become part of the promotion of such a bright and transparent image of the city.
In such a city there could be no grey areas, or so it seemed. Things were what they were and nothing else, unambiguous, lacking the subtleties of drizzle, shade and chill. Under the scrutiny of such a sun there no place to hide. People were everywhere on display, their bodies shining in the sunlight, scantily clothed, reminding her of
advertisements. No mysteries here or depths; only surfaces and
revelations. (5; italics added)
Resonating with the weather of Los Angeles, people’s first impression of it will be bright and sunny. It seems that there will be no secret hidden or concealed in the city.
However, as the narrator ends the section of Shalimar the Clown, “there are things that must be looked indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun” (309). The brightness of Los Angeles might prevent us from paying attention to the darker corners of the city. Everyone here seems to present the openness and the unanimity of the city unconsciously (or some users pretend to be unconscious about it). They are parts of the advertisements to promote the city’s well-known features: a city of no shadows or secrets and a metropolis welcoming or
attracting people to come to search for liberty, freedom and opportunity. The new life does not always turn out to be a good one. Many people come here to work as
“bellhops, bar hostesses, garbage collectors and maids” (10) no matter what they were before. “The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls” (10). Only very few people can live a prosperous or hopeful life here. People might escape from conflicts or restrictions in their homelands but soon need to be confronted with challenges and barriers in the city. The city is not always as clear and pure as it claims to be. It does not provide opportunities for all the residents living here. The sunlight attracts us but it also deceives us.
[T]o learn the city was to discover this banal city was an illusion. The city was all treachery, all deception, a quick-change, quicksand metropolis, hiding its nature, guarded and secret in spite of all its apparent nakedness. In such a place even the forces of destruction no longer needed the shelter of the dark. They burned out of the morning’s brightness, dazzling the eye, and stabbed at you with sharp and fatal light. (5)
The brightness of the city does not protect India/Kashmira’s father from being killed.
The brightness does not fill the loss of one’s expectations. The brightness does not shed light on all of its residents’ future. The brightness of the city does not make everything clear. Instead, the brightness of the city is such that it may stop us from looking at the city more directly. In Los Angeles, India/Kashmira finds no belongingness and no facts. She sees not only the triumphant of “a democratic city of the future” (21) made by erecting monuments of expedition but also the marginalization of some people’s everyday life there. For most immigrants that
India/Kashmira observes in the city, they are living like her. Some of them are dwelling in the past or trapped in the ocean that they crossed even though they have actually immigrated into the city for a long time. Some of them are pursuing dreams and hopes that the city itself claims to provide. India/Kashmira observes their lives and knows all of them, including herself, are searching for something lost.
The women gathering in the balconies of India/Kashmira’s apartment building are the ones who are still trapped in the past. In the evenings, the widows will sing their childhood songs “from the Baltic, from the Balkans, from the vast Mongolian plains” (8). They are from old Central and East Europe, with strange tongues “that might have been Georgian, Croatian, Uzbek” (8). For them, the city is like a
“shadowless lotus-land” (8), which attracts them, arouses their desire for the metropolis and gives them hope. They come to the city across the ocean for dislocation, for survival, or for “the lure of the West” (10) only to find out that the dream of elsewhere is an illusion. They are still trapped in the ocean, across which they believe there will be something better than their homelands. Therefore, the
“exhibitionist and desirous” old immigrant women can only flirt “the lurking and spiteful single men” (8), sleeping, gossiping and complaining. That is all about their new life, and “India saw it all” (8, italics added). She observes the apartment, which is like an agglomeration of sad stories of the time, accumulating their memories and futile expectations. She collects traces of lived space from different people so as to come up with her production of meaning of Los Angeles.
Olga Simeonovna, the Russian super of the apartment, represents the one who is still trapped in between the present and the past. She is said to have been “the last surviving descendant of the legendary potato witches of Astrakhan” and “the object of men’s admiration and fear” (9). However, now she lives in the city as a super of the
apartment because of her love of a sailor. She turns her potato magic into skills of changing light bulbs and collecting monthly rents of the apartment. When she tells the ambassador about her situation, she says
I live today neither in this world nor the last, neither in America nor Astrakhan. Also I would add neither in this world nor the next. a woman like me, she lives in someplace in between. Between the memories and the daily stuff. Between yesterday and tomorrow, in the country of lost happiness and peace, the place of mislaid calm. This is our fate. Once I felt everything was okay. This I now don’t feel.
Consequently however I have no fear of death. (9)
To escape the fear of the death and to pursue love, the woman chooses to live in Los
To escape the fear of the death and to pursue love, the woman chooses to live in Los