戲仿歷史中的對話論: 薩爾曼·魯西迪的《佛羅倫斯的女巫》

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 戲仿歷史中的對話論: 薩爾曼·魯西迪的《佛羅倫斯的女巫》 Dialogism in the Parodied History: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. 指導教授: 蘇榕 Advisor: Dr. Jung Su 研究生: 林佩汶 Pei-wen Lin. 中華民國一百零六年八月 August 2017.

(2) 摘要薩爾曼·魯西迪的小說經常使用奇幻元素和歷史的強烈存在感來檢視絕對真理的可能性。《佛羅倫斯的女巫》展現了一個對話論的世界，其世界的產生不僅是因為事實（文藝復興時期和蒙古歷史）與虛構（東西方的相遇和矛盾的展示）的融合，也是因為公共歷史論述與魯西迪特定化的、戲仿的歷史相互作用的結果。魯西迪的《佛羅倫斯的女巫》中的戲仿歷史成功地跨越了幾種不同體制的邊界。此文本的不確定狀態不僅來自於從真實世界到超現實世界的過境，從而解決了主觀客觀的二分法，也審視了真理的核心價值。我試圖透過巴赫汀的《對話論》，以及杭琪恩(Linda Hutcheon)的《戲仿理論》來處理這個議題。我的論文分為四個章節。第一章介紹小說家薩爾曼·魯西迪的生平和作品，《午夜之子》和《佛羅倫斯的女巫》的比較以及文獻回顧。第二章著重在介紹本論文涵蓋的理論框架: 對話論，戲仿後現代主義以及歷史。第三章：後現代的戲仿:《佛羅倫斯的女巫》試圖透過互文性，雙聲話語以及檢視在想像與現實之間跨界的對話論將《佛羅倫斯的女巫》分析為一部戲仿歷史。第四章是結論，我提及戲仿的功能，以及此小說中的雙重聲調，互文性和矛盾關係並非創造出超越任何時間和空間概念的反歷史論述。相反的，這部諧擬的文本展現了一個既強調現在也強調歷史的多元化世界。. 關鍵字: 薩爾曼·魯西迪，《佛羅倫斯的女巫》，巴赫汀，對話論，杭琪恩，《戲仿理論》.

(3) Abstract Salman Rushdie’s novels constantly confront the possibility of absolute truth with fantastic elements and the strong presence of history. The Enchantress of Florence is deeply rooted in a dialogized world; a result of the merging of the factual (the Renaissance and Mongol histories) and the fictional (the encounter between the East and West and the display of paradoxes) and also the interaction between the public historical discourse and Rushdie’s particularized, parodied history. Rushdie’s parodied history in The Enchantress of Florence successfully crosses several kinds of boundaries in different regimes. The text’s indeterminate status results from not only the boundary-crossing from the real to the surreal worlds, thus resolving the subjective-objective dichotomy, but it also problematizes the core value of reality. I intend to approach the issue by Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, together with the appropriation of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody. My thesis is divided into four parts. Chapter one is the introduction of the thesis, the novelist Salman Rushdie’s life and works, the comparison between Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence and finally, the reviews of literature. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical framework and key concepts covered in this thesis: dialogism, parody, postmodernism and history. Chapter three intends to rationalize The Enchantress of Florence as a parodied history through intertextuality, double-voiced speeches and the investigation of the dialogic discourse regarding boundary-crossing between imagination and reality. In the concluding chapter, I mention the functions of parody. The parodic factors of the novel—double-voicedness, intertextuality and paradoxes do not create an ahistorical discourse that seeks to transcend any concept of time and space. On the contrary, this parodied text exemplifies a pluralized world which emphasizes both the present and the past..

(4) Key words: Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, dialogism, Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody.

(5) Acknowledgements I would first like to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor, Professor Jung Su of the department of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Professor Su’s advice and instructions, particularly on my writing and the restructuring of chapters and ideas, have guided me through the trek of completing this master thesis. Her encouragement has been a tremendous support for me in the course of this academic pilgrimage.. I am also grateful for the experts who are involved in review of my thesis: Professor Pin-chia Feng and Professor Chun-yen Chen. Without their valuable comments, this thesis cannot be successfully completed.. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents, who have supported and encouraged me continuously throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. Thank you..

(6) Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction. 1. The Enchantress of Florence. 1. Rushdie, His Novels and Islam. 5. Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence. 7. Reviews of Literature: Secular Humanism, Intertextuality and Boundary-crossing. 9. Chapter Two: Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts of The Enchantress of Florence. 15. Dialogism. 15. Parody—an Effective Tool of Postmodernist Fictions. 19. Parody, Dialogism and Postmodernism in The Enchantress of Florence. 23. History in Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and in Postmodernist Theory. 26. Chapter Three: A Postmodern Parody: The Enchantress of Florence. 31. Intertextual Bouncing. 32. Another’s Speech; Refracted Authorial Intentions. 50. Border-crossing between Reality and Imagination. 55. Chapter Four: Conclusion. 62. Works Cited. 68.

(7) Lin 1. Chapter One Introduction Any mythological tale can bear a thousand and one interpretations, because the peoples who have lived with and used the story have, over time, poured all those meanings into it. This wealth of meaning is the secret of the power of any myth. —Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 48. The Enchantress of Florence My journey into Rushdie’s oeuvre begins with his well-known fiction— Midnight’s Children, whose title suggests the historical and political transitions of India and the imposed historicity on the characters. The following publications, Shame and The Satanic Verses, are both highly regarded by literary critics for their critiques on the contemporary politics and religion. One could say that these heavily lauded predecessors left a lasting impression which ostensibly reminds the reader of the stark contrast to the iceberg effect The Enchantress of Florence conveys, unless the reader digs deeper beyond the mystery to discover the latter’s true and inner workings. In my view, however, The Enchantress of Florence appeals to critics not for its utopian-like narration, but for the multiplicity presented by its intentions and structure. In fact, the harsh criticisms against The Enchantress of Florence ironically targets what this novel critiques—the literal interpretation of any representations. This critique on commonly accepted truth we believe in embodies the postmodern attitude—suspicion and the postmodern concern for the idea of closure (Bertens 145). In this light, I will approach The Enchantress of Florence from the postmodern perspective in my thesis..

(8) Lin 2. The Enchantress of Florence disappoints those who look for a single purpose. Yet, The Enchantress of Florence is not a historical romance. In contrast with a historical romance’s single purpose to entertain, The Enchantress of Florence keeps the audience in a state of suspension—between doubt and belief, between powers (humanism and an absolute monarch,) and between art and its creators. Moreover, The Enchantress of Florence does not meet the standard of historical novels because it lacks comprehensive historical details and elements of magic, nor should this novel be labeled as a political satire, because it contains more than dissents and political criticism. I contend that The Enchantress of Florence is a parody of history, because by imitating historical Mughal Empire and Florence, it problematizes representations of history. In this way, it further questions the representations of truth. This coincides with the spirit of parody. Parody draws on another context or discourse, be it historical facts or fictions. In fact, parody is more intimate with history than we have assumed. According to Mahdi Teimouri, parody “problematizes history and the history of representation” (4). Therefore, parody is also “historiographic metafiction,” in Hutcheon’s perspective (qtd, in Teimouri 4). This intimacy of parody and history is demonstrated in The Enchantress of Florence. This close relationship ultimately dissolves the dichotomous relations such as the disciplines—history and literature, the objective and subjective, and the objects and their metaphors. The Enchantress of Florence begins and ends with fictional characters: a golden-haired mysterious traveler: Mogor dell'Amore, who possesses many names—Agostino Vespucci and Niccolò Vespucci, arrives in Fatehpur Sikri with nothing but a tale; Qara Köz, or Angelica, or Lady Black Eyes, the hidden princess and also later, the enchantress of Florence. Yet, what follows this fictitious story is an ambitiously displayed long list of Rushdie’s bibliography, seeming to ensure a place for history in a story dominated by imagination..

(9) Lin 3 In the form of parody, Rushdie’s historical narration does not present a straightforward duplication of the history itself. Any literal understanding of the text fails to discern its resemblance of reality from the reality it seeks to problematize. The historical reality in The Enchantress of Florence is mediated by the fictiveness of the text that suspends one’s belief. The mediated reading becomes transformative with the present, always complicating itself in the paradoxical mechanism of parody, the self-reflexive consciousness of the metafiction, and finally the dialogic construction of a historical narrative. Firstly, parody’s paradoxical nature constitutes The Enchantress of Florence with the concept of historiography that draws its focus on the complex nature of historical representation. The exhibition of the improbable East-West encounter invites the reader to explore the human experience of forging history of any kind or at the very least its possibility. Other than merely celebrating cultural hybridity, Rushdie attempts to provide new forms of agency in which the reader is able to participate and interrupt freely: “Flirting, mixing things up, Rushdie imagines new opportunities for agency and intimacy within the imposed conditions of cultural encounter” (Walkowitz 133). Rushdie’s edited versions of truth demonstrate narrativism of history—“telling a story (or writing a history) is a construction we impose on the facts” (F. R. Ankersmit 6). Contrary to what it seems, this rewriting of history does not reject the possibility of truth but reveals the ambivalence of historical writing: that figurative language inescapably permeates solid truth. Additionally, Rushdie brings two contrasting worlds together in marriage in this novel—the imaginative and the real. I will discuss how Rushdie disintegrates this dichotomy between the fictive and the factual by aiming attention firstly at Rushdie’s juxtaposition of the prevailing acceptance of mysticism and dominant ideology of religion, and then at the relationship of imagination and reality..

(10) Lin 4. Both forms of imagination—magic and religion— were dominant in the sixteenth century of Florence and Mughal Empire. Yet, the narrator opts for magic for its humanistic, personal and timely values, while dismissing religion for its intention to be the metanarrative, dominant force that limits imagination. Although both magic and religion are considered to be forms of imaginations, religion’s impersonal tone alerts Akbar: “Was faith no more than an error or our ancestors?” (Rushdie 87) When one holds fast to religion for the sake of family habit, it means faith is just “eternal handing down,” an inheritance that one accepts unconditionally (Rushdie 87). Expanding the thesis of reality, Rushdie takes up the two ostensibly bifurcating concepts—imaginative works and reality. In The Enchantress of Florence, works of imagination and reality are on the same level of accessibility. The painter Dashwanth enters into his Pygmalion dream; his creation, the painting Qara-Köz-Nama eventually “uncreates” him. This transgression of reality becomes apparent as Akbar believes the border can be crossed in another direction: “A dreamer could become his dream,” just as he himself crosses said direction; it delimits the reality by forging Jodha into existence out of his fantasy (Rushdie 135). Not only is creation a form of life, life is a form of creation. Creators “conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings,” so life can be realized with imagination: Mogor dell-Amore, “a creature of fables,” brings his life to existence with mere storytelling (Rushdie 49, 50, 220). Sikri is another invention of Akbar’s, a “beautiful lie,” for he materializes his wish of a world “beyond religion, region, rank, and tribe” with the help of enough accomplices (Rushdie 45). The metaphorical content of imagination lies at the core of this novel, reflecting the world we live in; ideas that unite groups of people, such as nation-states and religions, are essentially mere imaginations. In other words, the world is a tale, and a tale is the world. In a detailed analysis of The Enchantress of Florence in Chapter three, I will.

(11) Lin 5. demonstrate how The Enchantress of Florence embodies other parodic elements—the double-voicedness of characters’ interpenetrating speeches and the interruptions of Rushdie’s authorial voice, the self-awareness that renders this novel metafictional nature, and finally dialogism that discloses the mutual reliance of opposing subjects, such as the self and the other. Ultimately, I contend that the parodied history in The Enchantress of Florence illustrates a transforming totality—the ostensible sameness of human and history that repeats itself are in fact embodiments of “discord, difference, disobedience” (Rushdie 339). This totality presents itself as the genealogical view of history; the history that is neither stable nor objective, but a politicized interpretation. In turn, this genealogical history reveals the attempt at truth, not the credibility of truth. One clear marker of the before mentioned attempt is its reflexivity; it is aware of its own emphasis on representations and performativity. In the end, the history of The Enchantress of Florence enacts the concept of absolute indeterminacy. Rushdie, His Novels and Islam Before further discussing The Enchantress of Florence, I would like to briefly sketch Rushdie’s early career and his previous works. Rushdie’s debut novel Grimus inaugurated Rushdie’s writing career with a rather low sale, but his second novel, Midnight’s Children became a huge success. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Arts Council Writers’ Award and the English-Speaking Union Award. After this much acclaimed novel, Rushdie published another two well-acknowledged novels: Shame and then The Satanic Verses. While Midnight’s Children tells a national allegory, an alternative history and magic realism, Shame touches upon contemporary political figures and creates dispute over its mocked and satirized politics. The more recent novels of Rushdie’s, besides his non-fictions, are The Enchantress of Florence, published in 2008, and the novel.

(12) Lin 6 published in 2010— Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to his children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The Satanic Verses, the cornerstone of his works, was highly praised by critics, winning the 1988 Whitebread prize (Pipes 42). Yet, the “blasphemous” depiction of Islamism in The Satanic Verses greatly offends the Muslim circle. What follows is the most widely-known incident of this author's life—the fatwa. The Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini issues the infamous fatwa against Rushdie. Born in Bombay, educated in England, and now living in New York, Rushdie grew up in a secular Muslim family. Several recurrent themes in Rushdie’s novels have a strong connection to his life experience, among which disbelief and migration participate in the construction of The Enchantress of Florence. Rushdie’s personal experience of dislocation prepares him distinct perspectives from being both an outsider and insider of cultures. Yet, I will purposely focus on Rushdie’s personal experience with religion in this discussion of Rushdie’s life and works, for the depiction of the dominant humanist ethos in The Enchantress of Florence constantly addresses the problem of faith. Tracing back his family line, Rushdie’s secularized ideal towards Islamism derives from his family tradition. According to Rushdie, his devout Muslim grandfather has been lenient to religion. It is also likely that Kashmiri Islam, to which his grandfather belongs, is indeed the more secularized and more peaceful in comparison to other branches. Moreover, to Rushdie, “Kashmiri Islam was – until the 1960s – a model of pluralist tolerance” (“Salman Rushdie: His life, His Work and His Religion” 2006). A simple observation of Islamic society reveals how religious texts are capable of establishing an entire community’s ideology by means of discursive establishments. For this, it is understandable that the Muslims take offense at The Satanic Verses. In.

(13) Lin 7. an interview with Jeremy Isaacs, Rushdie explains that The Satanic Verses is a novel that frequently problematizes the origin of the religion. Rushdie’s exploration of belief and faith touches upon the psycho-sensitive areas, in Sara Maitland’s term, the inviolability of the sacred text, and therefore can pose itself as a threat to the Muslims. Consequently, Rushdie’s parodic use of the religious text in The Satanic Verses proves the powerful influence written words have on the material world. Yet, people taking sympathy on Rushdie such as Daniel Pipes agree that only “unsophisticated readers” will see the novel as blasphemy; likewise, Rushdie himself considers those irritated Muslims have no sense of humor (53). Although Rushdie recognizes Muslims’ anger, he disagrees with accusing him of corrupting Islamism: “The real purpose of fiction is not to distort facts but to explore human nature, to explore ideas on which the human race rests itself” (Chauhan 99). In other words, discourses such as history and religion can become stages on which the author and reader explore human nature with various personae. Judging from this episode of Rushdie’s life, one cannot say that the art is purely out of the reach of the political or religions. In fact, in Rushdie’s writing, nothing stays pure; reality is permeated with imaginations and reversely the imaginary is invaded by the reality. The medley of all views of reality and the struggle between the aesthetic and the ideological likewise centralizes the discourse in Rushdie’s newest novel: The Enchantress of Florence. Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence One of Rushdie’s most outstanding novels: Midnight’s Children shares with The Enchantress of Florence similar features that Rushdie is most known of. Both novels present historical accounts with magic realism and both novels are fundamentally rewritten history with doubled narrative. According to Enrique Galván Á lvarez, Midnight’s Children also uses its characters to perform history : “History is, therefore,.

(14) Lin 8. fully and doubly narrativised, conveyed not only in the shape of a novel, but also revealed in the narratives of those who, in one way or another, participate in and embody it” (Álvarez, “Children’s Voices at Midnight” 118). Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence thus bear resemblances to each other in the way they treat history with fantasy and personalized accounts. Yet, Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence differ in the way hybridity is represented. Midnight’s Children is about the chaotic postcolonial era of hybridity whereas The Enchantress of Florence’s history is configured in the harmonious ambience. Thiara observes this difference between Bombay and the Mughal Empire, quoting Rushdie’s statement about Bombay: ‘Bombay, most cosmopolitan, most hybrid, most hotchpotch of Indian cities’” (qtd in Thiara 416). In Thiara’s observation, The Enchantress of Florence embodies differences within one unified synthesis: “Mughal synthesis is a more considered and planned experiment, an élite endeavour, rather than the chaotic and vibrant hybridity of Bombay’s streets” (Thiara 416). Moreover, Midnight’s Children is essentially a novel through which Rushdie attempts to figure out his own history while The Enchantress of Florence is the story of the power of story-telling. Like Salim Sinai, the protagonist in Midnight’s Children is handcuffed to history, serving as a metaphoric existence to history, the main characters in The Enchantress of Florence function as parts of the buildup for a liberating experience for a writer. Rushdie states in the interview posted by Random House of Canada: “The world of dreams and the world of material, reality were seemed as the same thing, and to write about that kind of world is a wonderful liberation” (“Salman Rushdie, author of The Enchantress of Florence”). Departing from the grim reality that Midnight’s Children deals with, The Enchantress of Florence embarks on a journey of playing with history and the idea of reality. If.

(15) Lin 9 Midnight’s Children depicts a world of conflicts in harmony, then The Enchantress of Florence finds harmony in contradictions. The approaches adopted in this thesis: Hutcheon’s theory of parody and Bakhtin’s dialogism provide space for the idea of liberation in The Enchantress of Florence. Parody’s ability to come to terms with the past, as Hutcheon points out, and dialogism’s acknowledgment of adversity in unity are essential elements in The Enchantress of Florence. The Enchantress of Florence constantly juxtaposes the grandiose official history with personal accounts, and it presents doubly-coded narratives in frame stories. Ultimately, regarding the issue of origin, both Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence embody characters of mistaken origins, yet The Enchantress of Florence focuses on the creative narratives brought by mistaken origin instead of questioning the idea of origin. Reviews of Literature: Secular Humanism, Intertextuality and Boundary-crossing The reviews of The Enchantress of Florence in this chapter cover a wide range of issues including cultural pluralism, feminism, secular humanism, intertextuality, boundary-crossing, and potential-relationality. Judging by its multiple themes, The Enchantress of Florence is itself a text of plural forms. I will select two themes to discuss in my literature review: intertextuality and border-crossing. Meanwhile, Rushdie’s interviews on The Enchantress of Florence reveal the author’s own exposition of the novel and thus reinforces the understanding of the story. The Enchantress of Florence depicts two worlds of liberalist characteristics: the Florence in the Renaissance age and the Mughal Empire under Akbar the religious tolerant emperor’s rule. The concept of secularism arises not only from the representation of the two powerful regimes but also from “the retreat of religion from public life paired with the decline of individual belief.” The accounts of humanism are.

(16) Lin 10 mainly exemplified in “a commitment to beauty as the ultimate aesthetic value” in The Enchantress of Florence (Neuman 678). A couple of critics list out the literary works that The Enchantress of Florence alludes to. Christopher Rollason points out that the princess Qara Köz parallels to Sierva Mara in Of love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez and Blimunda in Memorial do Convento by José Saramago. The traveler Mogor dell-Amore and the emperor Akbar remind the reader of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities. Radhouan Ben Amara also discovers the Indo-Persian storytelling tradition in The Enchantress of Florence. B.J. Geetha is another of the many critics who draw on intertextuality in this novel. Geetha provides the theoretical framework of intertextuality by listing its genealogy, in which Geetha draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism that emphasizes how the author, the reader and the text interact and interrelate. Although to some readers and critics intertextuality is the center of discussion, Rushdie suggests a casual attitude toward piled up allusions and historical facts. Certainly literary allusions in The Enchantress of Florence are one of the definitive characteristics, but Rushdie holds an open attitude toward the allusions and historical truths placed in the text. This can be juxtaposed with Rollason’s criticism of Rushdie’s immoderate writing and rewriting of history in The Enchantress of Florence, and his writing of a “medieval chronicle” (Rollason 2). Rushdie thinks that the reader is not required to have the exact amount of knowledge of allusions to read such a book (“Authors@ Google”). The making of the world will take its course once the reader starts turning pages. What the world in the novel means to the reader, says Rushdie, is the point from which the reader departs and takes on the journey of questioning. It is Rushdie’s attempt to arouse curiosity instead of lecturing his knowledge of history (“Authors@ Google”)..

(17) Lin 11 Yet, intertextuality conveys an intrinsic feature of Rushdie’s novels, that is, double-voicedness. The historical discourse in The Enchantress of Florence is not merely the background of the story. History is coded with the novelistic imagination. The novel is interactive inside the very text and between the reader and author. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism comes into play when the novel flirts with historical truth and when the reader participates in the construction of the narrative. Next, border-crossing— both geographically and ideologically—is also a major attribute to The Enchantress of Florence. The act of border-crossing takes place in The Enchantress of Florence when the characters cross geographical borders and when artists and their creations break the walls of reality. The theme of border-crossing is mainly brought up by Amara, who discusses the idea of the liminal zone between borders. In this liminal space, transformations are made possible. Meanwhile, Neuman also touches on the similar aspect of border-crossing in this novel by his emphasis on the role of novelistic imagination. Border-crossing in both geographical and ideological forms helps to establish the hybrid structure. Furthermore, this movement across boundaries challenges the frontier of reality. Amara examines both the status and the result of border-crossing actions. Borders generally refer to spatial boundaries, but they also signify constructed lines in social, cultural and political spheres. The Enchantress of Florence exhibits two kinds of border-crossing: the geographical border-crossing which is presented through several characters’ constant journeying across lands and oceans, and the paradigmatic border-crossing which occurs when beliefs are strengthened to the extent where they become reality. Amara offers detailed discussions about the ideas of frontiers and space, contending that frontier is the place of contact of self and other, and that frontier is always moving away from our reaches: “boundaries, edges, frontiers, thresholds, like.

(18) Lin 12. horizons, are forever in translation, always receding from our efforts to transgress them” (3). As the point of contact, the frontier recedes as soon as we reach it. Amara then discusses The Enchantress of Florence, noting its theme of “exile, displacement, nomadism, border-crossing, and the dense web of connection binding East and West” (12). In Amara’s discussion on exile, she brings up the interplay of the two concepts: normalization and excess. Using the immigrant writer Vladimir Nobokov as an example, Amara implies that humans or more specifically, writers, are essentially rootless and therefore their nationality should not be of utmost importance in terms of their writers’ identities, as Nobokov says: “The writer's art is his real passport” (qtd. in Amara 6). When migrant writers write, according to Rushdie, they need to find ways to re-appropriate themselves because they are without context: And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 278) In this sense, narration is a process of self-forming. For immigrant writers, the shaping of identity cannot be fully completed without self-appropriation, and therefore, without imagination. Rushdie thinks that as the metropolitan culture increases, we are all becoming migrants because we are all constantly crossing borders: “Migrants— borne-across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all I migrant peoples” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 278-279). In the contemporary world, crossing geographical borders with the help of technology takes place daily. Migration becomes a metaphor because it reflects our.

(19) Lin 13. conditions in the virtual world. Rushdie points out the idea of migration being metaphor for the contemporary society, and that immigrant writers like him need to negotiate their own identity through the act of imagining. Similarly, Neuman notes one key element of secularization is the novelistic imagination. Stories and their creators are the dominating forces in this fictional world: In Rushdie’s work, fiction and narrative are powerful, transformative forces; narrative is less a means of representing the world than a mode of apprehension, a metaphysical hammer he uses to smash certainties of causality, a forge of the alternate real. (Neuman 680) This leads back to Neuman’s point of secularization in The Enchantress of Florence. Literature assumes the role of god when literary works replace the divine texts. Beliefs are men’s imagination, and they prove to be mutually accessible. In our act of apprehending the world, we are also shaping the world at the same time. The frontiers in The Enchantress of Florence are not just political demarcations; frontiers also exist in the process of identity construction and in novelistic imagination. For the theme of border-crossing, Amara observes the incessant movement and the ensuing displacement and identity negotiation. Neuman notices this strong urge of Rushdie’s to place emphasis on the power of narrative and fiction. Hong-ling Guo, on the other hand, notices a different kind of relation in The Enchantress of Florence, that is, similarities. Guo critiques the policy of cosmopolitanism that specifies difference and argues that it is resemblance that Rushdie draws on in The Enchantress of Florence. Finally, via resemblance, the novel creates an all-inclusive world of totality. As a whole, Guo advocates a planetary view that surpasses cosmopolitanism, which is limited by its nationalist principal, and which ultimately goes beyond human. Guo believes that the message of the planetary.

(20) Lin 14. approach to The Enchantress of Florence is that mankind should recognize themselves as finite beings, but we are granted infinite possibilities by our imaginations. The above-mentioned analyses, although each present different approaches to The Enchantress of Florence, reveal two major aspects of the novel—its relation to other literary works and the theme of border-crossing. These two concepts will further establish dialogism’s proposition, which is to reveal double-voicedness and the novelistic perception of reality..

(21) Lin 15. Chapter Two Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts of The Enchantress of Florence. [W]e must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-languaged world. -- Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”. Dialogism In order to better explicate my dialogic approach in this thesis, a few perspectives from critics of Bakhin’s dialogism are taken into account. Because dialogism’s linguistic model focuses on the dualistic nature of speech, the dialogic idea of hybridization becomes the fundamental in the dialogic model. However, dialogism does not simply propose equality in the dualistic mode; it contains internal stratifications that prove to be hierarchical and performs the concept of the hybridization while embodying the authoritative voice. In fact, the political features actually consolidate Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dialogism consists of multiplicity expressed in a political fashion. Focusing on Bakhtin’s 1941 critical essay “Discourse in the Novel,” I explore his accounts of the structure of language and the novelistic style that demonstrates the dialogic and parodic. A dialogic novel, according to Bakhtin, incorporates heterolgossia, which is “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (324). Two different intentions are expressed in one utterance, which reveals the reprocessed authorial intention. According to the hybrid model, the multi-voiced world is a place in which the consciousness relies on otherness and every center is a decentered center; that is, a.

(22) Lin 16. relative rather than absolute state of being—a world that parody complies with. If we apply Bakhtin’s dialogic discourse to the reading of the enchanted past in Rushdie’s novel, the East-West encounter may be reckoned as a mobilized, open text. The dialogic discourse enlivens a historic text because it draws on the presence of relations: every wholeness is a part of the relation to another unit. Since dialogism “is built into the very structure of language itself,” the distinction between dialogue and dialogism is also worth noting (Hirschkop 104). Ken Hirschkop points out that to have a dialogue, one must engage in actions such as compromise, negotiation and “ideological give and take” (103). Meanwhile, dialogism, being the result of a novelist’s project, does not have real dialogues “but an interesting kind of complexity” (Hirschkop 107). Dialogism’s task is to “cite and represent” the primary texts’ language but not respond on equal terms (Hirschkop 108). In other words, dialogism does not work on an even “ideological give and take” model. Although dialogism brings to the surface the voices of the people, and seemingly advocates populism, dialogism does not necessary consist of equality that real dialogues do. Hirschkop says: “[dialogism] is valued not for the equal rights embodied within it, but for its quasi-Nietzschean ‘liveliness,’ its earthiness and vulgarity, its imbrication with interests and struggles” (108). Consequently, dialogism takes its form from dialogue, but it contains no such evenness one requires for real dialogue. The crux of dialogism is double-voicedness. “Double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized,” and examples for this dialogic discourse would be “comic, ironic or parodic discourse” (Bakhtin 324). In these texts, the narrator refracts the discourse through characters’ voices. Applying dialogism in the anthropological realm, Vincent Crapanzano points out the parodic nature of cross-cultural communications. Not only does the second.

(23) Lin 17 speaker inevitably re-contextualize the first speaker’s utterances (stereotypically,) but the utterances also coexist in an antithetical and thus hierarchical relationship (Crapanzano 437). This reveals not only the linguistic nature of dialogism but its political aspect. Correspondingly, parody “must evoke or indicate another utterance; it must be antithetical in some respect to that utterance; and it must have a clearly higher semantic authority than that utterance (Crapanzano 437). Their relationship exists as a form of competition; each voice always seeks to be the dominant one. Meanwhile, Hirschkop draws on parody to exemplify the working of double-voicedness; he says that parody appears to “combine the intentions or semantic position typical of a speech form with a second accent added, so to speak, by the author, who orchestrates the target language in line with his or her own aesthetic purposes” (104). Namely, the novelist purposely re-accentuates the primary source to achieve an aesthetic goal. Similarly, Sofya Khagi asserts that most postmodern parodies carry with them heteroglot languages, and they expose each other’s multiplicitous presence via coexistence (586). These examples of dialogism— cultural-exchange and parody—shows us that the dialogic novel is not a static, enclosed text whose discourse is well-kept and unchanged; instead, this parodic discourse expresses itself as an open text that invites contemporary voices to complicate its structure, its intentions and its problems. The fact that the efficacy of dialogism is based upon the concept of otherness reveals its link to Einstein’s relativism in the nineteenth century. Dialogism develops in a paradigmatic shift from the Newtonian idea of the world. Seeing dialogism as a version of relativism, Michael Holquist argues that within the concept of dialogism, “the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness”. Language, to which dialogism owes its debt, is built upon otherness as well: “Language becomes ‘a language’ when perceived alongside another language, and it is the relationship of the.

(24) Lin 18 text’s heterogeneous components to one another that compromises the components […]” (Kahgi 586). In other words, otherness helps to reveal and thus defines one’s consciousness. The participatory act in dialogism further denotes the idea that consciousness relies on the relation between the center and that which is not the center. Once again, in the dialogic realm, the center and the non-center are both shifting, rather than absolute ideas. Since the dialogic relations also entail “differences that cannot be overcome”, the self and other relation cannot be eradicated. Holquist enumerates other dualistic relations similar to the self-and-other unit, such as the signifier and the signified, the text and the context, and the system and history (Holquist 19). These above-stated subjects cannot sustain their existence without their correspondent parts. In like manner, Peter John Massyn points out this interdependency in dialogism, and perceives dialogism as potentially political: In these later manifestations, dialogism, whether in the guise of novelistic discourse or carnival culture, is thus clearly in the service of a political project. It is dialectically bound to its opposite: dialogism as a subversive tactic is determined by its opposition to a dominant monological discourse. (138) Moreover, according to Bakhtin, double-voicedness is vitalized not so much by individual contradictions as by a “social-linguistic speech diversity and multi-languagedness” (326). Dialogism is deeply rooted in the social and political ground and it embodies power-relations in which dialectical opposites coexist and are codependent. In other words, this political mechanism entitled dialogism cannot stay in stasis, and it will always remain a party of at least two members. Dialogism’s nature is inherently self-conflicting as it’s always an inclusion of two or more internal forces. Finally, there exists a noticeable connection between dialogism and the rhetoric.

(25) Lin 19. of parody. Given its paradoxical nature, dialogism sometimes expresses itself in the form of parody. Much like how Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination is composed in a parodic style— praising the multivocality in the novelistic discourse while embodying this hegemonic power that excludes the poetic genre, dialogism, sometimes takes the form of the carnival, possesses both the transgressive and hierarchical phenomena. Articulating in the form of parody, dialogism embodies the authoritative character and at the same time retains its subversive potential (Massyn 141). This also reveals how dialogism is a form of representation. Dialogism, therefore, does not simply present a direct, first-hand discourse. According to Hirschkop and Crapanzano, the second participant or discursive part in the dialogic relationship always re-contextualizes and re-accentuates the first participant’s speech or the primary discourse. Other characteristics of dialogism: double-voicedness, hierarchical power structure, and finally, its tendency to perform bent intentions parallel to the structure of parody. They all appear as homogenous groups, but within these singular units there exists the multiplicity that continuously transform.. Parody—an Effective Tool of Postmodernist Fictions Parody is most commonly applied as an effective tool in both postmodern and postcolonial fictions. Teimouri compares Fredric Jameson and Hutcheon's critiques of parody. According to Teimouri, Jameson holds a rather negative view towards parody, preferring the term pastiche instead of parody. The parodic practices, in Jameson's opinion, lack depth and history, which is also a fitting description for late capitalism. On the other hand, Hutcheon credits parody’s political efficacy. Parody exercises its political agenda through ironizing, which allows parody a historical continuation and also peculiarity (Teimouri 4). Hutcheon’s view of parody is “broad” and “liberal,” according to Brian Edwards, as Hutcheon liberates parody from the mere intent to.

(26) Lin 20 ridicule and emphasizes parody’s paradoxical nature to both imitate and subvert (66-68). My thesis will adopt Hutcheon’s point of view on parody—parody’s reworking of another text embodies both deconstructing and reconstructing. While the contemporary view of parody oftentimes limits the scope to parody’s comic effect, Hutcheon’s theory of parody incorporates both parody’s aesthetic (irony) and political (resistance within authorial control) functions. In brief, what characterizes parody is its paradox and ambivalence, and its ability to revise and construct at the same time. According to G. D. Kiremidjian, the fundamental principles of parody are expressed in three ways: firstly, it upsets the balance between its form and content; secondly, it questions the relationship between its form and content; lastly, it imitates art to expose "something about its basic character" (233). It is the last point from which parody works the most effectively, and that is when parody exercises its most vitriolic critiques. The metafictional feature of parody marks it a distinctively different form of criticism. Traditionally, parody disqualifies as art. Aristotle’s definition of art says the very function of art is to imitate life or mirror the nature (Kiremidjian 233). Unlike the kind of art Aristotle appreciates, parody mirrors itself and imitates another work of art. In other words, parody turns the original work into an “introverted and introspective” state. This double intention or paradox: to criticize and to represent are the key features of parody. Simon Dentith in his book Parody also highlights this aspect of parody: "parody involves the imitation and transformation of another’s words" (Dentith 3). In addition, William Van O’connor also regards parody as criticism: “One of the functions of parody is to make us see, or better, let us experience, the nature of a style and subject, and their excesses” (241). From this point, parodied texts have an ambivalent relationship with their target texts; parodies reenact, and thus participate in the guilt of the texts they criticize..

(27) Lin 21 Ann Jefferson, in her review of Margaret A. Rose’s Parody//Meta-Fiction says that the “object of criticism” becomes an integral part of the parody (232). Moreover, the criticism itself is ambivalent, for that parody does not always bear negative critiques against the target text. Similarly, Hutcheon thinks that the postmodernist critique is strange because it is in complicity with power and domination (4). Parody is the form of paradox that the postmodern discourse applies: "by both using and ironically abusing general conventions and specific forms of representation, postmodern art works to de-naturalize them" (Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 8). Parody, as opposed to the traditional definition as merely a rhetorical device, also functions on a political level. In the analysis of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Geneva Cobb Moore avers that Morison adopts this “ancient genre”— the use of parody to reconstruct and deconstruct the history of America. In her account of A Mercy as a demonic parody, Moore addresses several functions of parody: it reduces the authoritative power of the mainstream discourse, debunks the hypocrisy of the target text and thus deconstructs it, and it also problematizes the assumed authoritative boundaries (2). The dialogic relations lie in the crux of parody; dialogic relations do not entail egalitarian relations, but the hierarchical, mobile and contradictory intersubjectivity. According to Bakhtin, the aesthetic and political values of the novel are expressed through the dialogic relations, foregrounded by heteroglossia. In turn, heteroglossia becomes effective when it is situated in a dialogized context. In this case, parody dialogizes the heteroglot language, and contemporizes the past that was once fixated. Moreover, parody is capable of bringing the high of history to the low of the present (Bakhtin 21). Parody and dialogue’s “life spark” is ineluctably kindled by the social situation of the contemporary (Singer 176). That being the case, parody, dialogism.

(28) Lin 22. and heteroglossia perform with political intentions—they work with and against their enemies and they find unofficial moments of liberation within the legalized zone. Dialogism has a linguistic shape that suggests the emphasis on the stylistic, but dialogism takes on a social feature of language, that is, language as an “ideologically saturated” perspective that allows the “maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life” (Bakhtin 271). For this reason, dialogism is capable of representing the dialogized discourse which real dialogue cannot attend to. Although appealing to the concept of hybridization, dialogism does not embody simple equality; dialogism performs a multiplicitous world with its internally hierarchical stratum. Dialogic languages are also parodic designs for they express heteroglossia with an authoritative tone. The dialogic novel and the dialogue differ in dialogism’s representational acts and its intramural unevenness in contrast with dialogue’s premise of equal exchanges of the ideological. Although the dialogic discourse brings the voice of the people to the forefront, it highlights not the evenness of the people and those in power, but the “quazi-Nietzschean ‘liveliness,’ its earthiness and vulgarity […]” (Hirschkop 108). The key element of dialogism is double-voicedness, or “internally dialogized discourse” (Bakhtin 325). In a dialogized text, the characters speak with an already processed authorial voice. Double-voicedness can be applied to a modern phenomenon— cross-cultural communications. The second speaker in cross-cultural communications always refracts the original ideas from the first speaker, while both kinds of utterances remain in a competitive and hierarchical relationship (Crapanzano 437). Parody, in the case of double-voicedness, best exemplifies the working of dialogism. The author remodels the original voice with his or her own intention, and thus creates a voice of two accents. Parody, moreover, embodies heteroglot voices that mutually make each other’s existence seen. This feature shows that to be.

(29) Lin 23 conscious of one’s existence, the other is indispensable. Language possesses this feature as well, for it is perceived as language when the other language is present. Dialogism also consists of the following traits: interdependency, difference, and paradox. These two voices in the dialogic language convey interdependency and also the idea that difference is insurmountable. Moreover, the mechanism of dialogism is inherently paradoxical, because dialogism embraces what it critiques—it is both subversive and authoritative. Dialogism is an authoritative voice critiquing another authoritative intention. Finally, because of its contradicting nature, one cannot neglect the performativity of dialogism. Dialogism’s double-voiced and hierarchical disposition makes it a performative discourse that is oftentimes enacted through parody.. Parody, Dialogism and Postmodernism in The Enchantress of Florence Being situated on the boundary between form and content— fiction and facts, the story of The Enchantress of Florence plays with those dichotomous ideals in the form of parody. Parody corresponds to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism because this literary device includes multi-voicedness and act of hybridization. According to Phiddian, “[a] complex parody can involve not just a particular aesthetic object, but many kinds of discourse within its own structure” (683). The Enchantress of Florence is therefore a postmodern parody, for this novel transgresses the authority within the authoritative discourse (history) and it presents an incomplete space that gives access to the contemporary intentions. In The Enchantress of Florence, the story presents the dialogic relations by form—incorporated genres, and by including multiple voices—concealing another’s speech in the present speech. What is more, this novel conveys the dialogic space between two opposing sides—the space.

(30) Lin 24. between fiction and fact, between authority and subversion and between creator and creation.. The parodic form, dialogic value and postmodernist concept enter the story of The Enchantress of Florence also in a dialogic relation. The dialogic discourse carried out by parody inevitably resonates within the postmodernist realm. The complexity of parody lies in its juggling of different intentions, or discourses—“A complex parody can involve not just a particular aesthetic object, but many kinds of discourse within its own structure” (Phiddian 683). Robert Phiddian points out that the essence of parody is the relations between those incorporated texts: “[the meaning of parody] is a matter of relation and constant cross-reference between the parody and its model” (684). Correspondingly, postmodernism operates in the form of parody: “[p]ostmodern discourse […] not only entangles primary level discourse with secondary or meta-level discourse but it also confounds description with prescription” (Crapanzano 435). The first part of Crapanzaon’s description of postmodernism conveys postmodernism’s tendency to incorporate other discourses while the second half shows its confusing nature: one cannot reject nor accept postmodernist prescription to reality (435). Approaching The Enchantress of Florence through the lens of postmodernism makes apparent the various forms of interactions, allowing all aspects to mingle all at once without resorting to a single meta-narrative.. As Hutcheon points out, to stress on the worldly nature of parody, one needs to redefine parody and delimit parody from the conventional conception. Parody is traditionally perceived as a kind of mockery, an act to ridicule. As parody’s etymological origin informs us, parody’s prefix “para” in Latin means both “counter” and “against,” and “odos” means song (Hutcheon 32). Parody is thus generally considered to be a form of imitation intended to tease or insult. However, Hutcheon.

(31) Lin 25. finds a more neutral definition of parody from Samuel Johnson and Susan Stewart which states that parody means changing the original idea for the new purpose or replacing the original elements with the new ones to have “an inverse or incongruous relation to the borrowed text” (qtd. in Hutcheon 36). Conclusively, Hutcheon defines parody as repetition with difference, and “imitation with critical ironic distance” (37).. Yet, parody can be confused with quotation, pastiche or satire. Unlike quotation or citation that is “a matter of nostalgic imitation of past models” and borrows the authority of the primary text or speech to suit their needs, parody confronts formality, recodes and “establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon 8). Judging by their forms, quotation and parody share similar aspects such as their invitation of the authoritative voices, but parody departs from quotation by its tendency to alter the original meaning, in the disguise of mere imitation. Likewise, pastiche seeks to imitate but parody attempts to transform. In this case, parody is more flexible with adaptations whereas pastiche needs to stay in the same genre as its model (Hutcheon 38). According to Hutcheon, parody differs from satire because parody is intramural while satire is extramural—“social, moral” (44). On top of that, parodied texts are not always negative as satirized texts. Yet, parody can be extramural and therefore satiric; satire, on the other hand, is not necessary parodic.. All in all, parody is both historical and social. Parody is the synthesis of the past and present texts as well as value judgments, both “a personal act of supersession and an inscription of literary-historical continuity,” and both a critique and imitation (Hutcheon 35). Moreover, this transformative potential makes parody a worldly text because it adapts to the social context and the present interests..

(32) Lin 26. Parody and dialogism meet at the ground of referentiality. According to Hutcheon, “Postmodernist metafiction’s parody and the ironic rhetorical strategies that it deploys are perhaps the clearest modern examples of the Bakhtinian ‘double-voiced’ word” (72). Namely, double-voicedness occurs in the “reported speech,” that reprocess the past speeches and that is absolutely referential—“as discourse within and about discourse” (Hutcheon 72). Parody engages with the past in dialogic discourse.. In The Enchantress of Florence, the parodic frame continues and reactivates history; the recorded Florence and the Mughal Empire and their people are at once “re-presented” and reappropriated. This ambivalent relationship between The Enchantress of Florence and its model of history is set off from its dialogic discourse in which hybridized relations exist. Incorporated genres and literary allusions are both manifestations of the referentiality of dialogism. In addition, the dialogic concept exists within The Enchantress of Florence’s parodic structure, which intensifies the interactions and relationships among the author, the character and the reader. In the end, this circulated power—that each refers to the other displays that power relationship can be inverted, even the one between the real and unreal.. History in Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and in Postmodernist Theory There have been debates centering on the problem of representation in the realm of historiography, because history is a mediated idea that is liable to intended distortions of truth. Distortions of history give access to the advanced control over both public and personal realms. Louis Wolf, in his discussion of government manipulation of history, urges the modern historians of our current day to “reach beyond the ‘official,’ government-issue version of ‘history’" (Wolf). There is the.

(33) Lin 27. obvious gap that Wolf observes that is between a sensationalized narrative disguised as truth and the sober truth in our historical texts. Meanwhile, dichotomizing fictional and factual writings has become the norm in terms of literary categorization. Yet, when it comes to the issue of reality, historical writing and fictional works do not necessarily contradict each other. History and fictions seemingly belong to different realms, but when the problem of representing truth becomes the focal point of the postmodernist age, the two disciplines: history and literature begin their interactions. We tend to expect historical knowledge to be a truthful recount of the past, and coming from this point, the decided foundation of historical writing is factuality. Alan Sheridan sympathizes with this view by expounding his personal analysis on the subject; he says: “'[h]istory suggests a certain assurance, sanctioned by an institution, a discipline and, ultimately, reason itself" (13). Tracing this realist thesis back to the eighth century BC, Aristotle speaks of the distinction between history and poetry. Beverly Southgate says that Aristotle considers the significance of poetry greater than that of history, for that ‘poetry is chiefly conversant about general truth, history about particular’ (qtd. in Southgate 14). Conclusively, history is about events fixed in the past, and therefore, the particularity and certainty limit the compass of imagination and the flexibility of exploring different perspectives to ponder upon general truth. Nonetheless, the acquisition of historical knowledge takes a linguistic turn in the twentieth century, and this trend informs us that history cannot escape narrativity. Under the threat of the postmodernist thesis which proposes an anti-realist value, historians are confronted with the idea that whether there are truthful accounts of the past. Postmodern theory of history rests on the notion that the “past cannot be the object of historical knowledge” and therefore, “the past is not and cannot be the referent of historical statements […]” (Zagorin 13-14). This narrativist value of history entails treating history as an inevitably fictional nature that makes history.

(34) Lin 28. seem somehow no different than fictional stories (Zagorin 14). Postmodernism sees truth as an ideological construct especially by the hegemonic groups. History is regarded as a filtered product, changing its status with the present discourse. Thus, the postmodernist approach to history is closely linked to two theses which Zagorin points out: “anti-realism” and “narrativism” (13-14). Historical facts, though seemingly static and enclosed, are actually open to (re)interpretations. This does not renounce the existence of facts, nor does it imply that historical writing is ultimately pointless. However, it reveals how facts cannot represent themselves without the process of interpretation. History inevitably enters the imaginative realm when it is represented. The fact that historical representation is by no means simply the duplication of truth offers a new route to examining reality, as F.R. Ankersmit points out: “History is the first discipline that comes to mind if we think of disciplines attempting to give a truthful representation of a complex reality by means of a complex text” (3). Both the concept of reality and the process of literary construction are complex in nature. Increasing in complexity, historical writing itself is a form of literary construction; literary works inevitably consist of the author’s voices and adaptations of “truths.” Thus, historical writing (representation) admittedly poses “new and interesting problems, both unstatable and unsolvable within the parameters of existing philosophy of language” (Ankersmit 3). The connection between history and postmodernism can be further explicated with Michel Foucault’s genealogical history which substantiates the postmodernist conception of history. As a postmodern philosopher of history, Foucault’s association with the postmodernist view of history is apparent (Thompson 74). In his essay: ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault’s genealogical history provides a non-linear view of history that probes into the concept of origin, draws attention to representations of.

(35) Lin 29. history, and shows its capability of self-awareness. Paul A. Bové defines genealogical history in his analysis of the three modern genealogists—Nietzsche, Foucault and Said: […] genealogy is itself a systematic representation of the intellectual and of “objects” of knowledge—even if an ironic subversion of all other systems—and, as a result, “the relation of the individual subject to systems of representation must be reconsidered. (380) Genealogical history focuses on representations, that is, performativity, instead of providing objective truth. In Lynn Fendler’s words, genealogy is not a statement but a performative utterance that “does” something instead of “saying” something (450). Hence, what genealogy proposes is political effectiveness—it is a performative critique, an incitement of discord and an interpretive authority that facilitates communications (Fendler 451-53). In this genealogical sense, history is not a static, objective matter, but rather an interpreted and, therefore, politicized tool. Behind the ideas of the event, the body and the performative role genealogical history plays, the primary concern in genealogy is to problematize the pleasing idea of origin. Jeffrey T. Nealson notes that genealogy counters the search for origins: “that is, it opposes itself to the search for conditions of possibility” (Nealson). In Nealson’s definition, what contrasts the conditions of possibility are the conditions of emergence—Nietzsche’s “Entstehung,” and Foucault’s “event” (Nealson). Though advocating an alternative historical view, genealogical method, much like the postmodern strategy, recognizes its limits. Understanding how each era is affected by the power relations, genealogy is aware of its “perspectival limits” of the present (Fendler 454). Although genealogical history repudiates the grand view of history, it retains its “meta-professional” authority, and this is precisely the paradoxical characteristic of genealogical history. In addition, genealogy embodies.

(36) Lin 30. the contradictions by practicing what it critiques, as Habermas points out: “genealogical historiography emerges from its cocoon as precisely the presentistic-, relativistic-, cryptonormative illusory science that it does not want to be” (qtd. in Fendler 459). With the elements above-mentioned, genealogical history best expresses itself in the form of parody, for both genealogical history and parody question origin and authoritative voice while embodying the authority. Moreover, they both perceive their restrains. In brief, genealogy opens itself up to emergence, events, and discontinuity. Accordingly, genealogy opposes the notion of the essence in historical development; there is no center or origin from which historical events unfold. In the intersected ground in The Enchantress of Florence, where contradicting values encounter: the East and West, the present (author’s intention) and the past (history,) and also reality and fantasy, the background text—history— becomes the open text inviting the descendants to use and abuse. Not only are the fictional characters constantly in competition with the historical figures, the parodied version of history is also continually confronted by the prior text—the officially recorded history. Furthermore, this parodied history in The Enchantress of Florence both creates and critiques, in its conscious act of performance. Conclusively, this artificially constructed history is indispensable in the course of the inspection of the concept of history..

(37) Lin 31. Chapter Three A Postmodern Parody: The Enchantress of Florence. 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..

(38) Lin 32. 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.

(39) Lin 33. 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.

(40) Lin 34 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.

(41) Lin 35 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.