In parody, double-intentioned speech is utilized to encode the author’s opinion or to create an awareness of the hypocrisy. Double-voicedness is one dialogic relation most evidently presented in what Bakhtin calls “another’s speech,” and he defines another’s speech as follows:
Another's speech-whether as storytelling, as mimicking, as the display of a thing in light of a particular point of view, as a speech deployed first in compact masses, then loosely scattered, a speech that is in most cases impersonal ("common opinion," professional and generic languages)-is at none of these points clearly separated from authorial speech: the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single syntactic whole, often through a simple sentence […]. (308)
Another’s speech operates on the ground where the interplays with languages and intentions are evident and where all these languages are inevitably tied to the
author’s. Bakhtin explains that these are the fundamentals in comic novels, which are the “most basic forms that are typical for the majority of novel types” (301). The play of speeches and the tension this juggling between speeches generates shape The Enchantress of Florence into a parody of history.
Both pseudo-objectivity and quasi-direct speeches feature the interaction and mutual dependence between the author, character and sometimes the
reader. In pseudo-objectivity and quasi-direct speeches, multiple intentions engage in
the play of language. Pseudo-objectivity means “the logic motivating the sentence seems to belong to the author, i.e., he is formally at one with it; but in actuality, the motivation lies within the subjective belief system of his characters, or of general opinion” (Bakhtin 305). This says how the character can in turn affect the text and the author in the zone of his own—“his own sphere of influence on the authorial context surrounding him, a sphere that extends-and often quite far-beyond the boundaries of the direct discourse allotted to him” (Bakhtin 320).
Meanwhile, quasi-direct speeches seem to belong to the characters, but instead they are already permeated and re-accented by the authorial intention. When
analyzing the novel Virgin Soil by Ivan Turgenev, Bakhtin points out that the character’s interior monologue is “transmitted in a way regulated by the author, with provocative questions from the author and with ironically debunking
reservations […]” (319). Thus the quasi-direct speech appears to be the monologue of the character, while it is already complicated by the authorial intention and his ironic re-accentuation. In conclusion, both pseudo-objective motivation and quasi-directness are double-voiced speeches; yet, pseudo-objective voice disguises itself as the
author’s voice when it is the character expressing his or her intentions; whereas quasi-direct speech is the merge of two voices.
These two forms of double-voicedness demonstrate how a seemingly single totality is actually the combination of multiple contesting, contradicting or complicit voices. The two kinds of “another’s speech” show how the dialogue between the character and the author often appears as monologue—“inside this area a dialogue is played out between the author and his characters—not a dramatic dialogue broken up into statement-and-response, but that special type of novelistic dialogue that realizes itself within the boundaries of constructions that externally resemble monologues”
(Bakhtin 320). The dialogue between the character and the author, accordingly, is not simply a “statement and response,” but the dialogue that recognizes both the
constructiveness of languages and that enables boundary-crossing between languages.
This following example demonstrates the use of quasi-direct speech. This is an episode in which Akbar’s mad elephant is supposed to perform the trial of “the Garden of Hiran” on Mogor dell’Amore. Instead of stomping Mogor dell’Amore to death, the mad elephant becomes quiet and calm, allowing Mogor dell’Amore to caress him. When arguing with Birbal, Akbar’s wise consultant, Akbar says: “Here, then, is an argument you will not be able to refute. The elephant’s judgment is multiplied in potency if the emperor endorses it. If Akbar agrees with Hiran, then the elephant’s wisdom is multiplied until it exceeds even yours” (Rushdie, The
Enchantress of Florence 102). The narrator disguises himself as Akbar. The narrator’s point of view is in the guise of Akbar’s speech. Moreover, this speech directly
addresses the reader. When Akbar seems to jump out of the story frame, it is actually the narrator who delivers the metafictional speech. This fact that “the elephant’s judgment is multiplied in potency if the emperor endorses it” is intentionally parodic (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 102). On the surface the narrator attempts to point out the “obvious fact” that the emperor decides the capacity of the elephant’s intelligence; yet, in actuality he is aiming at exposing the hypocrisy of this “fact.”
Jodha, Akbar’s sheer imagination in The Enchantress of Florence, serves as another example of double-speech. Johda’s interior monologues are oftentimes Akbar’s interior monologues, which in turn, are Rushdie’s interior monologues.
Jodha thinks herself as the perfect woman representative of all women: “When a boy dreams up a woman, he gives her big breasts and a small brain [..] when a king
imagines a wife he dreams of me” ( Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 54). This is also quasi-direct speech because Jodha is merely the projection of Akbar’s mind.
She cannot voice for herself. All of her interior monologues belong to others.
Jodha’s status reflects the silent queen figure in history and also all characters in stories. Their identities are all made up by the author and re-imagined by the reader.
Its powers of enchantment needed no explanation and everyone who saw that first painting realized that Dashwanth’s exceptional powers of intuition were revealing the hidden princess as a born Enlightened One, who instinctively knew what to do to protect herself, and also to conquer men’s hearts, which often turned out to be the same thing. (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 127)
This part of the speech would be the example of pseudo-objectivity. The common knowledge mixes with Rushdie’s. The image of princess becomes a co-creation of
“everyone” when she is a result of Rushdie’s artistic decisions. As a consequence, the thought that belongs to the character “everyone” fuses with the narrator and Rushdie’s voices. Gradually, Rushdie’s voice takes over that of the narrator’s and the
commoners.
The linguistic hybridity in the excerpts mentioned above is an act of authorial unmasking. In the first quoted passage, the author exposes the extravagant authority of Akbar by implementing his own authority. In the second quoted example, the authorial voice intentionally fuses with the common belief and thus presents an ironic juxtaposition of the people’s belief in the story with the reader’s. In this linguistic hybridity, different voices do not just simply confront each other. Merger and disguise take place in this limited realm. The author remains his highest position in this
linguistic hierarchy. Meanwhile, this author’s finalization of the power game becomes apparent only when the reader perceives it and decodes it.
The issue of authorship is at the core of these doubly-coded speeches. Language is itself a contested field; it is never neutral and always political. The internal strata of these speeches: the author’s, the narrator’s, the characters’ and the readers’ statements enable the signifiers to have multiple signified simultaneously. Intentions (the
signified) compete against each other in double-voiced speeches that are
“overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (Bakhtin 294).
Because of the political nature of these double-speeches, parody presents the kind of temporary liberation performed in the Bakhtinian carnival. The carnival in
Bakhtin’s theory demonstrates the slim freedom existent within the constraints of official control:
The relativising potential of carnival practices thus offered an occasion for the skids to be put under the prevalent truths of the medieval order, and it is because of this, argues Bakhtin, that they were able to penetrate the realm of serious culture so effectively during the social upheaval of the Renaissance. (Taylor 14).
Being able to subvert the original within its very own realm, parody is able to achieve both “transgression” and “authorization” (Hutcheon 74). What lies within the
characters’ speeches is the author’s ironic inversion. On the contrary, in the speeches which seem to be delivering the authorial intention there exist the characters’ own aspect of reality.
Parody thus functions as not just “temporal telescoping,” but a medium through which the readers “are never allowed to abstain from recognizing the parody or from
judging and questioning themselves” (Hutcheon 92). Parody gets away with literary confinements and presents the readers the hybrid consciousness that mirrors and criticizes the tyrannical discourses.
Border-crossing between Reality and Imagination
Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstructed.
–Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands122 The represented and the presenter—creation and creator interact dialogically in the relations between the famous painter Dashwanth and his paintings, Akbar and Jodha, and Mogor and Qara Köz. These characters ultimately mirror the relations of God and man, history and historian, and the Pygmalion tale. In the end, this
boundary-crossing from many directions suggest that the authority of reality in this novel can be dismantled.
Mirroring relationships are one of the fundamentals in The Enchantress of Florence, and Dashwanth is such a symbolic character that he mirrors characters of creators: Akbar, the builder of Fatehpur Sikri, Mogor, the narrator of the hidden princess, and finally the author Rushdie who creates the impossible encounter between the Mughal Empire and Florence on page. Furthermore, Dashwanth is also crucial to the story because he in a metaphorical sense creates the Mughal Empire:
[T]he union of the artists prefigured the unity of the empire and, perhaps, brought it into being” and the hidden princess Qara Köz, under the command of Akbar—“Paint her into the world […] for there is such magic in your brushes that she may even come to life, spring off your pages and join us for feasting and wine” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 126).
Arts are just as believable as reality, and reality, in turn, becomes as abstract as imagination. In the end, Dashwanth mirrors the Pygmalion sculptor—“Dashwanth released into the only world in which he now believed, the world of the hidden princess, whom he had created and who had then uncreated him” (The Enchantress of Florence 135).
Correspondingly, the two female protagonists— Jodha and Qara Köz—
exemplify the power of creations by incarnating the Pygmalion myth. Jodha’s existence parallels to the Pygmalion statue, only that she herself refuses to believe:
She had heard from the emperor a traveler’s tale of an ancient sculptor of the Greeks who brought a woman to life and fell in love with her. That narrative did not end well, and in any case was a fable for children. It could not be compared to her actual existence. (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 50).
This is a quasi-direct speech that reveals both Jodha’s belief and the authorial intention. Jodha’s actual existence is like the Pygmalion statue, being a figure of fable. The irony lies in the fact that Jodha’s own voice has no validity, even for herself. On the surface, Jodha falsely believes she is free like everyone else, although being singularly the product Akbar imagines—“She was his mirror because he had created her that way but she was herself as well” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 52). Nevertheless, the narrator asks the rhetorical question to contradict Jodha’s belief—“[w]as her will free of the man who had willed her into being?”
(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 52). In conclusion, Jodha is a Pygmalion figure who disbelieves in the Pygmalion dream. This shows how subjective belief system only presents a part of the truth. Jodha’s faith in her own existence is
self-deceiving. This further implicates the reality, which is formed by one’s belief, can be false. Like Jodha, Qara Köz is another Pygmalion figure, whose seemingly all-pervasive magic power only affects the believers of her tale.
Meanwhile, Qara Köz also exists in the story as a representation of art; her appearance problematizes the concepts of identity and reality. Qara Köz’s textualized self presents a dialogized identity that is at once a literary allusion and response to the male gaze. Qara Köz is an artwork done by Mogor, Dashwanth and Rushdie.
Moroever, Qara Köz’s identity also references another text— her second name Angelica alludes to Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. Angelica is a fictional character in Orlando Innamorato whose enchanting beauty attracts eager suitors. Angelica eventually leaves Orlando, which makes him insane. Qara Köz is a product of
imagination that is able to make a difference in the fictional world of The Enchantress of Florence. Qara Köz’s responsibility for Dashwanth’s disappearance delineates the circulated power relation that Rushdie points out in this novel: “the clutch or echo of power could also be reversed. The salve girl could sometimes imprison the royal lady.
History could claw upward as well as down” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 132). In The Enchantress of Florence, power relations go in circulated motions.
Creator and creations do not stay in still positions.
Hence, the source of identity, origin, on the contrary, can be the result of identity construction. This reduces the authoritative status of past in terms of identity.
According to Patrascu, Qara Köz represents the process of identity building (12). Nonetheless, Qara Köz’s journey of identity building proves to be futile; she eventually fades into a sort of ridiculed incestuous tale mirrored by camels—“The physical freedom of the camel, we have always thought, offers a lesson in amorality to mere human beings” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 369). Qara Köz
ironically consumes the story and makes the story of Mogor an illegitimate
tale—“The Mirror’s daughter was the mirror of her mother and of the woman whose mirror the Mirror had been” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 381).
Consequently, Mogor’s identity is not what he believes to be; he is the mirror of the mirror of the Mirror. This destructs Mogor’s search for origin and the process of Qara Köz’s identity forming only “enlarge[s] the nothingness of her existence”
(Patrascu 12). Conclusively, the idea of an actual past is shaky, as the past can be just as inventive as any other imaginative entities.
Ultimately, this dialogic relation between those creators and their creations mirrors the relationship between man and religion. Man, by believing in the purely imaginative power, enter the realm of their own creation and become uncreated. This explains why in The Enchantress of Florence, Akbar shows more than once his distrust of religion—“He trusted beauty, painting, and the wisdom of his forebears. In other things, however, he was losing confidence; in, for example, religious faith”
(Rushdie 62). Additionally, Akbar’s interior monologue, a set of rhetorical questions best demonstrate how creation (god) can have power over its creator (man)—“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? Could a god, once created, become impossible to destroy? Did such fictions acquire an autonomy of the will that made them immortal?”
(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 88). The authorial intention is already evident in these questions; Rushdie reminds the reader that creations become immortal only by their creators’ insistent belief. All in all, through these dialogic relations between creations and creators, the unresolvable situation in which man decidedly renounce their power in god’s presence is reflected.
Conclusively, this novel demonstrates that imagination can be the source of reality, the boundary separating fiction and fact can be crossed from another direction. This in turn deconstructs the authority of reality. The genius painter Dashwanth materializes this theory, for he not only has the power to rewrite history through art, but also crosses to the imaginary realm which he creates—“Dashwanth released into the only world in which he now believed, the world of the hidden princess, whom he had created and who had then uncreated him” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 135). Creations prove to be a compatible force to their conjurors and imagination no longer serves as a form of imitation of reality;
imagination can model reality.
Revealing the reversed relationship between art and reality, The Enchantress of Florence also discloses the two principles of postmodernism; one is the linguistic inclination in the postmodernist approach, and the other “its objection of realism”
(Zagorin 7). In Sofya Khagi’s review of Timur Kibirov’s poem “To Igor,” she notes this reversed relationship between life and art in the light of dialogism— “the
perception of life as a ‘paraphrase’ of art” (590). The result is that “reality appears to be bookish, fictitious, ‘read’” (Khagi 590). With the fusion of imagination, reality is endowed with multiple possibilities. In The Enchantress of Florence, different belief systems also display how “reality” is a relative concept. The traditional and religious, the sorcerous, the humanist and aesthetic ideals cohabit in the story. Akbar’s
inclination of pantheism is also another indicator showing the preference for
multiplicity. Consequently, this novel displays the idea of decenterment, since reality is no longer the base of all creations. Reality is context-dependent and relative. The center of the world we perceive is thus deconstructed.
On account of the reversed power relationship between the creator and his creation, The Enchantress of Florence exposes the ambivalence regarding the concept of reality. Furthermore, this novel’s multiple versions of voices and truth convey the postmodern rejection of homogeneity. According to Neuman, Akbar in The
Enchantress of Florence views pluralism as an adequate system for abiding
dominance, which is in contrast with religion’s “transcendental justification for the work and rhetoric of domination” (678). Postmodern concept of multiplicity also manifests in Mogor dell’Amore’s conversation with Akbar: “I am attracted toward the great polytheist pantheons because the stories are better, more numerous, more
dramatic, more humorous, more marvelous” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 150).
Meanwhile, other forms of imaginative powers such as art and magic present alternative beliefs to religion. This relationship between creations and their creators parallels to that between man and god. Humans, the author of religious texts and inventor of belief systems, submit themselves to their own imagination. Artistry can prove to overpower their creators. Reality, the origin of identity and human subjects, thus becomes problematic. The character Dashwanth bears an emblematic presence indicating that history is an artifice, and reality can be the result of artistic
constructions. Furthermore, Dashwanth reveals that boundary-crossing—between reality and imagination—can be done in another direction, which dismantles the fixedness of reality.
Multi-voicedness, conclusively, not only manifests in the quasi-direct and peusdo-objective speeches, it also appears in the conceptions of reality. Different perceptions of truth construct an open-ended textual world of The Enchantress of Florence. The parodied historical events, the way characters’ and authorial intentions interact in speeches and the reversed power relationship between the creator and
creation construct a world of enchanting multiplicity that is always engaged in
creation construct a world of enchanting multiplicity that is always engaged in