History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices,
misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge.
—Salman Rushdie, IH 25 The Enchantress of Florence is a novel composed of revised historical truths that enable imaginary encounters between the East and West. Through this staged
East-West encounter, The Enchantress of Florence presents a multiplicity of forms of hybridity. Neuman points out that this novel is at once a “globe-traversing prose romance” and a historical fantasy; its ambivalence mirrors its theme of hybridization and form of parody (Neuman 676). The multi-layeredness and hybridity come from the structure of The Enchantress of Florence that is made up of layers of tales and interweaving ideologies from both the past and the present. I propose to approach The Enchantress of Florence with the emphasis on both its form and content; that is, in the light of a parody.
The Enchantress of Florence embodies the dialogic discourse with both its form and content. Dialogism manifested in this novel firstly with various relationships: that between forms—history and the novel, between the encoder and decoder—the author and reader, and between unreality and reality. In the end, The Enchantress of
Florence unleashes contingency, and creates a world that is transforming with the present time.
An underlying network in which The Enchantress of Florence develops its storyline and form is the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism thematized in The Dialogic Imagination. The dialogic capacity of The Enchantress of Florence is performed with the incorporation of the two disciplines—the novel and history, and with polyphonic intentions. According to Bakhtin, the novel itself functions as parody that
contemporizes the past models:
Alongside direct representation—laughing at living reality— there flourish parody and travesty of all high genres and of all lofty models embodied in national myth: The ‘absolute past’ of gods, demigods and heroes is here, in parodies even more so in travesties, ‘contemporized’: it is brought low, represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity. (Bakhtin 21)
The novel contemporizes the absolute past that is long celebrated in the other poetic genres and makes this absolute past accessible and transformable with everyday life.
Intertextual Bouncing
Truth is restored by reducing the lie to an absurdity, but truth itself does not seek words; she is afraid to entangle herself in the word, to soil herself in verbal pathos.
—Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, DI 309
Intertextuality is based on the texts being context-dependent and their therefore incompleteness without the readers’ recognition of their relations to other discourses.
Michael Riffaterre explains the working of intertextuality: “the perception that our
reading of a text or textual component (paragraph, sentence, phrase, or word) is complete or satisfactory only if it constrains us to refer to or to cancel out its homologue in the intertext” (Riffaterre 374). Intertexts demand the reader’s keen perception of their references, or they fail to construct the intertextual relations.
Meanwhile, intertextuality defined by Ann Pearson suggests two aspects related to dialogism: the act of re-authoring and the dialogic relation between different
discourses (of different periods of time): “It can refer both to a condition under which all texts originate and to a practice: that is, the appropriation and ‘reauthoring’ of texts for new purposes, an act that subverts modern Western conventions of authorship, property, and origin between different time frames” (Pearson 262). The process of reinvention and the exchanges between texts, the two features of intertextuality together with the role of the decoder contribute to the narrative of The Enchantress of Florence. I will begin the discussion of intertextuality with literary allusion which concerns the intertextual relations between One Thousand One Nights and The Enchantress of Florence. I will then begin with historical references.
Literary allusion is one of the most salient features of The Enchantress of Florence. According to Amara, The Enchantress of Florence’s Akbar and Mogor allude to Invisible Cities, its border-crossing to The White Castle, and its art and reality to My Name is Red. In addition to those literary allusions, Ecaterian Patrascu also reminds us this novel’s literary interactions with several other novels. Qara Köz resembles Sierva Maria in Of Love and Other Demons. Akbar and Jodha’s story parallels to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Literary allusions complicate a novel with their interweaving stories. Yet, rather than simply quoting other texts, or merely create competition between texts, the parodic discourse creates several kinds of symbiotic relationships. The “cross-pollination” of literary works
demonstrates the novel’s parodic tendency to refer to the past models (Mack xiii). The process of decoding a parody yields to the symbiotic relationship between the
storyteller and the listener.
Among these works, One Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights’
Entertainments is the one literary forefather central to The Enchantress of Florence.
Amara notes the literary tradition of the “Indo-Persian storytelling” within The Enchantress of Florence: “lush images, forked progressions and digressions, its obliterations of boundaries between magic and reality,” (Amara 13). Amara’s observation of this imitation of The Nights accurately responds to Rushdie’s explanation of the purpose of this novel. Rushdie admits in an interview that The Enchantress of Florence is a novel about “the persuasion, or the persuasiveness, or not, of storytelling” (“Random House of Canada”). Rushdie himself does not persuade his readers; he makes the protagonists do the work of persuasion. In The Enchantress of Florence, all characters take part in storytelling and many storytellers sell their imagination in exchange for life. This is the fabric of The Nights, which in turn structures The Enchantress of Florence.
More than “lush images, forked progressions and digressions, its obliterations of boundaries between magic and reality,” The Enchantress of Florence reflects The Nights’ theme of storytelling and mirrors The Nights’ status as a collage of cultures and literary allusions. Rushdie recreates a literary world in which the Eastern and Western cultures meet through acts of storytelling. The Nights, however, itself is a meeting point for the East and West. “As we shall see, some of the most popular stories in The Nights (the so-called ‘orphan stories’, including ‘Aladdin; or, the
Wonderful Lamp’) appear never to have been part of the ‘real’ Eastern collection at all, and were for a long time thought to have been the intrusive products of the Western
imagination” (Mack xii). Mack notes the western literary influences on The Nights, saying that Sinbad’s third journey resembles Odysseus’ adventure, “The Story of the Enchanted Horse” bears a recognizable similarity to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and “The Story of the Sleeper Awakened” contains the same formal sameness as William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (xiii). Both The Nights and The Enchantress of Florence are syntheses of many cultures and social discourses through time. Yet, the dialogic circulation of The Nights differs from that of The Enchantress of Florence. The Nights’ individual tales are passed down orally through time,
remaining unorganized until the early nineteenth century (Mack xii). The Enchantress of Florence is a crafted unity designed to express the author’s bent or direct intentions through the pathos of that age.
The Nights and The Enchantress of Florence also distinguish themselves from one another in the ways they incorporate magic:
In these stories, the Arabs are portrayed as inhabitants of a magical and mysterious kingdom of boundless wealth and unutterable beauty, full of Jinns, devils and goblins, men flying in the air, flying horses, magic, a Dance of Death, and supernatural birds, talking fishes, and exotic scenes of harems, slaves, eunuchs, princes, and kings along with wonderful stories like those of Ali Baba and Sindbad. (Al-Olaqi 384)
In The Nights, magic has the same status as the living reality. In The Enchantress of Florence, nonetheless, magic shares the same status as religion, a form of imagination that is subsumed under reality. Akbar pondered the existence of this form of
imagination: “If man had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it possible for a creation to escape the power of the creator?” (Rushdie, The Enchantress
of Florence 88). Although Rushdie attempts to write a world of the harmonious relationship between magic and other forms of beliefs, he does not create a world in which magic shares the equal footing as reality. The magic has no visual forms in The Enchantress of Florence; it merely has effects and fades when the believers cease to show interest in it. Dashwanth can enter the realm of his imagination because of his strong indulgence in his make-belief world. Qara Köz’ power to enchant is given by both the narrator and the believers of her world. Her power eventually fades near the end of her storyline.
The Enchantress of Florence and The Nights share the similitude of their incorporated cultures and histories. The Nights presents stories as the reality while The Enchantress of Florence exhibits a world where stories and reality interfere in each other’s realms. Through the competitive relationships between imagination and facts, The Enchantress of Florence deconstructs the dual and equal positions of imagination and reality in The Nights.
Imagination is both partly reality and partly an issue in The Enchantress of Florence. Characters at times are made to make references to other literary works which mirror themselves as a parodic gesture to remind the reader of this novel’s distance from those works. Jodha unknowingly mentions the Pygmalion myth and criticizes its simplicity. Jodha thought this ancient tale “could not be compared to her actual existence” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 50). Qara Köz reacts to the protagonist Angelica from Orlando Innamorato whose name she takes after: “’poor Angelica! So many pursuers, so little power with which to resist them, or to impose her own will upon them all!” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 295). These meta-fictional gestures make apparent the ongoing dialogism between two realms:
reality and imagination.
The Enchantress of Florence’s reauthoring of The Nights intensifies the interchanging powers of reality and imagination and presents those incorporated characters and storylines as incomplete, therefore welcoming texts that can continue their transformation through reader’s active reading. Furthermore, The Enchantress of Florence’s meta-fictional features reveals the inescapable nature of “historical
layering” of narratives and hence undermines the notion of authenticity through literary reworking (Pearson 262). Consequently, the new purpose that The
Enchantress of Florence achieves with its literary reworking on The Nights is readers’
rising awareness of the transformative process of storytelling.
Distancing the reader from the story he or she immerses in, The Enchantress of Florence presents a different form of framing narrative from that of The Nights.
Parody manifests the dialogic interaction between these two texts and also between the readers’ and the characters’ reality.
In The Enchantress of Florence, intertextuality signifies not only the incorporation of literary texts but also of different discourses. The two
genres—history and the novel—both take part in the tales of The Enchantress of Florence, at times as direct speeches and at other times as refracted voices. That is, these historical events, figures and voices are at times presented through direct quotations in the novel while at other times they are exhibited in a distance from the original historical discourse.
The dialogic relations manifest in the juxtaposition of the historical discourse and Rushdie’s imagination. First, the novel is set at the clashes of ideologies—the East and West and the medieval and the Renaissance, providing Rushdie a design of a world representing multiplicity. Secondly, the major scenes are deliberately
constructed on the border of reality—Fatehpur Sikri in The Enchantress of Florence is in between the fanciful and real. The stories mainly take place in Sikri, “an urban form in transition between camp and metropolis” (Richards 29). Despite Sikir’s existence being historically grounded, the Sikri in The Enchantress of
Florence undergoes the process of mystification, appearing as a mirage: “Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 29).
Correspondingly, the time of the novel—Renaissance Florence also marks a transitional ground—the birth of the modern world. The medieval and modern worlds are drawn in the dialogue. The historical background in The Enchantress of
Florence responds to the author and reader’s present intention and therefore stays in the moment of transformation.
Italian cities in the Renaissance time undergo an ideological change marked as the predawn to the modern world by the Western canonical thinking (Athanasios Moulakis 7). In this transitional period, the Renaissance texts are full of ambiguities;
its culture is packed with confidence of individualism that both liberates creative energies and invites anomie (Moulakis 7). Meanwhile, the Mughal Empire under the legendary emperor Akbar’s rule recaptures the lands, and its glory lasts for a hundred and seventy years. Like Florence, the Mughal Empire is a “dynamic, centralized, complex organization”; there are frequent flows of human and financial resources as well as information (Richards 1). Both powerful cities exhibit historical
cosmopolitanism, parochialism and shifts of world view.
Moreover, Florence, according to Neuman, is greatly impacted by “mercantile capitalism” and the “revival of classical aesthetics” (676). Gradually, Florentines experience this paradigmatic shift from “the enchanted world of medieval
Christendom” to the above-mentioned capitalist ideology (Neuman 676). This time of the human history is confronted by both ethos of decadence and the spirit of rebirth;
the clashing ideologies, the double, or even multiple values and voices are both the cause and effect of the this transforming century. Rushdie in the interview answers:
“What you see is the world we now live in just being born […] and that is true everywhere” (The Film Archives). The new era, new perspective and new world are now in the process of becoming. Therefore, Rushdie chooses to depict this time and place not without its emblematic purpose— its specific atmosphere where
hybridization is constantly at work.
However, Rushdie disregards the also prevailing “disenchantment thesis,” as Neuman points out, in pursuit of the portrayal of “the realpolitik of the Medici family and Florentine sexual libertinism” (677). Seeking to depict the similarities of the two worlds—Sikri and Florence, Rushdie does not focus on the topic of Renaissance movement. Instead, Rushdie calls forth the ethos of decadence—“sexual
licentiousness, and a thriving public culture of prostitution” (Neuman 679). He builds Sikri as a “liberal citadel” that is “extremely permissive and Florence as an alternative reality, basing the public life on sensuality (Patrascu 3).
In other words, this parody of history quotes history partially, incorporating imagination and overt literariness in order to present a world of dialogic forces. The Enchantress of Florence is a “plural text” in terms of how its time situates in the encounters of discourses and its place located in the grey zone between the real and unreal.
Together with the time and space of history, historical events, when parodied, liberates the space between the two discourses—one that concerns truth and the other
one that performs truth. The Pazzi Conspiracy can serve as an example to demonstrate how Rushdie reappropriates this historical episode in an ironic tone.
In 1478, the conspirators Pope Sixtus IV, his nephew Gerolamo Riario, the Pazzie family and Archbishop Salviati attacked Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici in a cathedral. Lorenzo escaped with injuries while his brother Giuliano was stabbed to death. The conspirators were later caught by Florentines and henceforth “the Medici remained firmly entrenched in power” ("Pazzi Conspiracy"). The following excerpt presents the ridiculed performance of the Pazzi Conspiracy in The Enchantress of Florence:
Bernardo ran with the two boys, scared and excited at the same time, just like they were. Bernardo was a bookish man, boyish, sweet, and blood was distasteful to him, but a hanging archbishop was different, that was sight worth seeing. The boys carried tin cups with them in case of useful drips. In the Piazza they ran into their pal Agostino Vespucci blowing loud
raspberries at the murderous dead and making obscene masturbatory
gestures at their corpses and shouting “Fuck you! Fuck your daughter! Fuck your sister! Fuck your mother and your grandmother and your brother and your life and her brother and her mother and her mother’s sister too.
(Rushdie 142)
The father of il Machia and the boys—il Machia, Nino Argalia and AgostinoVespucci together witness the commonly accepted performance of execution. The grandeur of this supposedly grim scene became a vulgar, sexualized and unimportant experiment among those boys: “[t]he boys carried tin cups with them in case of useful drips”
(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 142). The symbolic presence of the
archbishop, a demonstration to generate fear and appreciation of Medici’s power becomes an object of the three boys’ childish hunt for a mistaken tale of mandrake.
The original version and the parodied version of the Pazzi Conspiracy are at once shown in difference and similarity. When the structure of this historical event
provides the audience a spectacle of punishment, this parodic version belittles the execution and lightens its effect. In this parody, the original version of history, however, is not subsumed under the parodic one. The truth, as Bakhtin contends, becomes clear when it is completely deflated to an absurdity—“Truth is restored by reducing the lie to an absurdity, but truth itself does not seek words; she is afraid to entangle herself in the word, to soil herself in verbal pathos” (309). The two versions of truth are juxtaposed, the original history and Rushdie’s parodied history reveals each other, through the act of mirroring.
The combination of high and low is manifested in this parodic passage. In this part of the novel, parody’s crooked nature fully exploits the Pazzi conspiracy, turning the epic and tension-filled political crisis into an everyday episode of the three boys’
juvenile adventure. The result of this act of parodying history incorporates another renowned concept of Bakhtin’s: the carnival. Bakhtin’s dialogism and carnival go along with the populist concept, as Hoy mentions the recognizable social aspect of dialogism, saying that dialogism is “the unmasking of social languages” (769). This passage presents different social discourses, performed by the three teenage boys and the historical background of the hanging. The carnival, according to Hoy when analyzing Clair Will’s feminist approach to carnival, places “public indecency” and
“official order” in proximity (777). The combination of high and low also presents itself in this episode as the oxymoronic representation of death and birth. Instead of glorifying the circle of life, Rushdie diverts the attention to the sexual images. Adding
to the irony is the demystification of the mandrake root; in later part of the tale, the mandrake is proven to be a mere poisonous plant instead of a sorcerous root.
In conclusion, the historical events depicted in The Enchantress of Florence do
In conclusion, the historical events depicted in The Enchantress of Florence do