失去的樂園：魯西迪《小丑薩利瑪》的空間再現

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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. 失去的樂園：魯西迪《小丑薩利瑪》的空間再現. Paradise Lost: Spatial Representations in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. 指導教授：蘇. 榕. Advisor: Dr. Jung Su 研究生：林. 憶. 珊. 中華民國一百零四年七月 July 2015.

(2) i. 摘要《小丑薩利瑪》是魯西迪首次探討有關喀什米爾衝突以及恐怖攻擊議題之小說。有別於其他著眼於恐怖主義與反恐怖主義關係等論述，本書可視為魯西迪書寫樂園的寫作計畫之延續。樂園乃至失樂園的意象可謂是魯西迪作品中相當重要的主題，除了代表作者對於逝去之理想的哀嘆，亦是提供魯西迪述說那些在當代現實生活中未被提及的故事的藝術空間。在《小丑薩利瑪》中，魯西迪透過書寫虛構的喀什米爾村莊帕希岡以及美國加州的洛杉磯，重塑了對於失去的樂園之想像。除了描繪出樂園如何被破壞，帕希岡與洛杉磯的空間再現可視為是魯西迪試圖連結無法回復的樂園意象與逝去的喀什米爾主義的一種表現。本論文旨在檢視魯西迪於《小丑薩利瑪》中如何透過描述居民們的觀點去表現樂園不再之意象。本論文共計五章。第一章為緒論，說明魯西迪作品中樂園意象與喀什米爾主義的關聯，並簡述《小丑薩利瑪》在再現失去的樂園過程中所呈現的相關議題。第二章援引列斐伏爾的空間生產理論，並探討再現的空間如何展現抵抗的力量。第三章閱讀帕希岡村莊的空間再現，試圖理解該空間如何從和諧的村莊風景轉變為處在交戰狀態中的失樂園，並檢視人們如何經歷並記憶樂園的逝去。第四章則檢視洛杉磯作為帕希岡對應與相關的樂園意象，探討遷移帶給城市想像的不同敘述觀點，以及故事中角色印地亞/卡什米拉的紀錄片計畫如何呈現她試圖抵抗外在強加的知識與暴力。第五章總結本論文，探討魯西迪書寫帕希岡以及洛杉磯兩地的空間再現所呈現出的共通點，並連結魯西迪對於喀什米爾主義的看法，釐清作者於《小丑薩利瑪》中書寫失去的樂園之意圖以及作者如何面對暴力之反思。. 關鍵字：魯西迪、《小丑薩利瑪》、列斐伏爾、空間生產、再現的空間、喀什米爾主義.

(3) ii. Abstract In Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, the writer directly talks about the issues of Kashmir conflicts and terrorist attacks directly for the first time. Different from dominant discourses on terrorism and counter-terrorism, the novel can be regarded as a continuous part of Rushdie’s literary project of writing paradises. The image of paradise, especially lost paradises, has become an important motif in many of Rushdie’s works. It not only refers to Rushdie’s lament for his lost ideals but also serves as an artistic space for the writer to speak for those untold stories of our contemporary realities. In the novel, Rushdie reinvents the remote village in Kashmir, Pachigam, and the metropolis in California, Los Angeles, as his emblem of paradise lost. Both of them do not merely represent the destruction of paradises in general. Instead, the spatial representations of Pachigam and Los Angeles as irretrievable paradises can be connected with the loss of Kashmiriyat. My thesis aims to examine how Rushdie portrays the two places through perspectives of their residents to represent irretrievable paradises in Shalimar the Clown. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction, in which I briefly discuss the connection between the motif of paradise in Rushdie’s writing project and the author’s search for Kashmiriyat and provide an overview of how the novel can be read as a story of irretrievable paradises. In chapter two, I try to investigate into Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and his elaboration on resistance force emerging from representational spaces. Chapter three will focus on spatial representations of the fictitious village in Kashmir, Pachigam, in order to examine its transformation from a harmonious village into a smashed paradise in militancy and to tease out how people experience and memorize its destruction. In chapter four, I turn to its counterpart, Los Angeles, to see how migration brings alternate.

(4) iii. narratives into the vision of the city of angels and how India/Kashmira’s documentary project exemplifies her efforts to resist imposed knowledge and violence. In the final concluding chapter of the thesis, I would like to tease out the common features shared by the two places and examine Rushdie’s intention of writing lost paradises and his reflection on encountering violence in Shalimar the Clown.. Key words: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, representational spaces, Kashmiriyat.

(5) iv. Acknowledgements When I was astonished by the beauty of Hagia Sophia during my trip to Turkey for the presentation of a conference paper, an idea came into my mind: we may not know what we will eventually get after the journey, but the landscapes and experiences that we collect during the journey will be the best gift that we are blessed with. The years of studying in National Taiwan Normal University will undoubtedly be a significant journey in my life. I have learned and experienced a lot of things that I had never expected. I genuinely appreciate all the people that have helped me and encouraged me during the past years. I cannot express my gratitude enough to my thesis advisor Professor Jung Su, who has been helping and encouraging me in many aspects since the first year of my graduate program. Without her encouragement, patience and guidance, I would not have acquired the treasurable academic experience in conferences and completed my thesis. Also, I am deeply indebted to Professor Kun-liang Chuang and Professor Hsiuchih Tsai. Professor Chuang’s insightful questions and advice for my thesis help me clarify my arguments. Professor Tsai’s warm encouragement and constructive suggestions sustain me to improve my thesis. I also want to thank Professor Chun-yen Chen for her helpful guidance during my proposal hearing. I would like to express my great gratitude toward my beloved family and lovely friends for their constant support for my decision and their strong confidence in me. I feel blessed whenever I hear their kind words or feel their warm hugs. I feel blessed when I know my dear grandmother will bless and protect me wherever she is. “I am proud of you!” The sentence my friends and family members have said to me encourages me to fulfill my dream and to achieve my goals in this difficult year. I am a fortunate person and this thesis is dedicated to my loved ones..

(6) v. Table of Contents. Chapter One: Introduction. 1. Searching for the Lost Kashmiriyat. 8. Shalimar the Clown: A Story of Irretrievable Paradises. 16. Chapter Two: Resistant Force of Representational Spaces. 25. Henri Lefebvre’s Triad of Space. 25. Resistant Force of Representational Spaces. 33. Migration and Representational Spaces. 36. Chapter Three: Pachigam: Perspective from the Lost Paradise. 39. The Buried Past. 40. Destruction of Pachigam: The Loss of Kashmiriyat. 47. Return to Pachigam. 62. Imaginary Homeland. 64. Chapter Four: Los Angeles: A City with No Angels. 69. Spatial Representations of Los Angeles. 70. India/Kashmira’s Documentary Project. 84. Chapter Five: Conclusion. 92. Works Cited. 97.

(7) Lin 1. Chapter One Introduction Acclaimed as “a writer of an expanding world” (Tygstrup 198), Salman Rushdie addresses not only issues about the East and the West respectively but also the confrontation between them in his great number of stories or essays. In his major novels Midnight's Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), The Enchantress of Florence (2008) and other novellas and critical essays, Rushdie tackles a wide range of issues of the day, such as history, migration, identity, politics, globalization, and the essence of literature. As a whole, in Rushdie’s literary world, literature offers possibilities of reinvestigating history and opportunities of articulating what has been usually ignored or covered up in our daily life. In as early as his first novel, Midnight Children, Rushdie has alluded to his Kashmiri background by creating Dr. Aziz,1 an E. M. Fosterian figure coming from Kashmir. In this eighth novel published in 2005, Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie directly probes into the Kashmir issue and complexities of migration through an intriguing portrayal of temporal/spatial relations lying in an assassination in Los Angeles.. Different. from. narratives. mainly. focusing. on. terrorism. and. counter-terrorism, the story only ostensibly resembles a post-9/11 fiction for the assassination theme and the protagonist’s Islamic background. Essentially, the novel can be seen as a part of Rushdie’s larger vision of a lost ideal world and his extended meditation on space, migration and collisions between different values. Through his characters’ perceptions of Pachigam and Los Angeles, both of which represent tarnished paradises in different forms, Rushdie manifests his imagination of Kashmir. In Jung Su’s reading of Midnight Children, Dr. Aziz is apparently “a parody of the protagonist, Dr. Aziz, in E. M. Foster’s A Passage to India” (74), “whose eclectic mixture of the western liberal tradition and Islamic tradition is very much the reflection of [Rushdie’s] own cultural background” (75). 1.

(8) Lin 2. in turmoil and his scrutiny of the cosmopolitan city so as to unfold our changing spatial and social relationships. It is in the changing spatial production of Pachigam and Los Angeles that readers may find that Rushdie does not merely talk about paradises in general but something that Rushdie and his characters have tried to retrieve behind the lost paradises. The destruction of paradises has been an important motif in Rushdie’s works. Seen as a Shangri-La existing long before the Partition, Kashmir usually represents a utopian figure in Rushdie’s earlier works. However, this utopian figure of a composite India has been gradually distorted and lost its credibility2 because of the increasing and intensifying conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. The idea of an exclusive Hindu nation has replaced the inclusive feature of India. By retrieving the lost utopian vision of the world, many of Rushdie’s novels render the hybrid ancestries of India as a fact that people once possessed and were proud of rather than a problem that needs to be solved by military force. The loss and the attempt to retrieve such a utopian figure thus recur in Rushdie’s works, indicating his lament for a lost ideal and the anticipation for it in the future. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem begins his stories in pre-partitioned Kashmir where his grandfather Aadam Aziz, representing “the beginning of modernity in Kashmir” (Hogan 531) and the beginning of the declining spirit of Kashmiriness, unfolds a historical narrative which comes to a halt with a question in E. M. Foster’s A Passage to India.3 According to Patrick Colm Hogan, the chapter of Kashmir functions as a different mode of connection and transition “from what went before” to According to Nicole Weickgenannt Thiara, “[t]he idea of an inclusive, composite Indian nation based on tolerance and cultural synthesis was a key component of secular nationalist discourse during the 1930s and 1940s” (158). 3 According to Jung Su, Rushdie’s creation of Dr. Adam Aziz, “a westernized native intellectual tortured by a hole (the religious doubt) in the heart, a symbol of his embarrassing in-betweenness” (74-75), is a reconsideration of the question that Foster proposes in the end of A Passage of India: “Why can’t we be friends now. . . . It’s what I want. It’s what you want” (316). 2.

(9) Lin 3. the “national imagination” (528) of India, because in the year of 1947, the region was getting involved in the dispute of national identities. Kashmir in Midnight’s Children represents a lost Indian tradition of hybrid parentages before the birth of the nation, and the loss seems unable to be retrieved on account of the aggravation of the disputes. After 1989, when Kashmir began to suffer the intensified conflicts between India and Pakistan, in the course of his hiding due to the fatwa, Rushdie introduced the valley of K in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) as an “allegory from a child’s perspective of the violence that has torn Kashmir apart since 1947” (Kung 86). Many literary critics regard the story as a transition of the author’s artistic mode after the fatwa. Justyna Deszcz argues that the utopian valley of K actually provides an artistic solution to Rushdie’s predicament since 1989: Rushdie created a world without imposed silence, in which literature, by harboring the right to free expression, functions as a guide to the dark alleys of current history. Admittedly, this vision has so far been attainable only in a fairy tale, but the book did help Rushdie ease himself out of the fatwa spell and recommence writing, the result of which was The Moor's Last Sigh. (28) The valley of K, as an imagined space in Rushdie’s artistic world, enables Rushdie to express his thoughts, his resistance against the threat of fatwa, and more importantly, his attempt “to push the boundaries as much as possible” (Rushdie, “Provoking”). It helps the author to illustrate the rights that he has been deprived of as well as what the village of K symbolizes: tolerance and freedom. Having conceded that the paradise has been smashed, Rushdie then tries to compare what we once possessed and what we have lost in his literary world. In The.

(10) Lin 4. Moor’s Last Sigh, he juxtaposes the Indian history with "a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation" (The Moor’s Last Sigh 227), which represents an interrogation against the idea of an exclusive Hindu nation (Thiara 158). For Aurora, a character who tries to paint a tolerant Moorish Spain over the ugly present of India in the novel, the imaginary Mooristan is a place “where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. . . . One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine” (The Moor’s Last Sigh 226). J. M. Coetzee in his review of The Moor’s Last Sigh sees this as a “Palimpstine project,” in which the author lays stress on “not overpainting India in the sense of blotting it out with a fantasy alternative, but laying an alternative, promised-land text or texturation over it like gauze” (“Palimpset Regained”).4 The author paints a myth of tolerant Moorish Spain over the cruel reality of India, even though the painting becomes darker and darker in the novel. The author’s attempt is not to offer a fantastic world in literature for writers and readers to rest upon but to reevaluate the histories which we might have overlooked. The portrayal of a paradise lost in the past thus becomes Rushdie’s humanistic response to violence and intolerance. In the conclusion of Justyna Deszcz’s essay, she refers to this loss-of-paradise vision: [T]he hegemonic forces of intolerance in India may lead to another inquisition. No wonder Rushdie's tale has been interpreted not as a utopia but "an elegy for lost ideals, for Bombay, for India, for home, and ultimately, for Rushdie himself (Goonetilleke 147), a tale about a In his review of The Moor’s Last Sigh, Coetzee argues that Rushdie’s palimpsestual representation of Moraes over Boabdil and other parallel textual palimpsestual layers are a vigorous “novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical device,” with which the author proposes a contrast between the consequences of ethnic and religious intolerance and what might have taken place: “the Arab penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenth-century Inquisition in Spain.” 4.

(11) Lin 5. paradise lost and a final defeat. (46) Therefore, the representations of paradises in Rushdie’s works do not refer to a process of restoration but a reinvention or reinterpretation of the loss of his home, his ideals and his faith. The author cannot and does not try to restore it or to provide a fantasy that may help ease his pain of losing the paradise. He tries to represent the historical development of its destruction to see what is missing from our contemporary realities. On the other hand, the loss is not a stable and fixed object in the past. Rather, it is an artistic reconstruction of what Rushdie has perceived, conceived, and experienced in the world, which eventually becomes the writer’s direct interrogation to the world. The stories of paradise lost are not merely repetitions of the author’s lost ideal; rather, they represent the process of how Rushdie relates himself to the world and to the loss in the past, the hope for the future and the challenges at present. Echoing The Moor’s Last Sigh but departing from its conspicuous palimpsestual metaphors, Shalimar the Clown turns to the spatial representations of two different forms of paradises: a fictitious village in Kashmir and a metropolis in the U.S. By teasing out the development of the two places, we can see how people project their desire to retrieve what they once possessed and their hope for the settlement in a better place onto their interaction with the changing space. The two places seem unrelated and different in many aspects at the beginning of the novel. However, in the revelation of each character’s background and their observation of the places, we will see that both places share a similar landscape of paradise lost. The author intertwines the two lost paradises with his sustained efforts to counter the defined boundaries imposed by dominant political or religious discourses. In Rushdie’s reinvention of Pachigam and Los Angeles as irretrievable paradises, we see not only the spatial.

(12) Lin 6. representations of their destruction but also the fading of Kashmiriyat that makes the two places similar and related. By depicting the deprival of Kashmiriyat, which represents Kashmiris’ harmonious living experience and their pride in the manifestation of tolerance in Kashmir, both places are treated as the embodiment of Rushdie’s elegy for lost ideals and his effort to resist the violence imposed on him in the global context of the last 20th century. Following Rushdie’s previous works where the author represents the irretrievability of lost paradises and his artistic response to violence and changing social relations, Shalimar the Clown further exemplifies the prevailing influences of violence and migration of our time. When everywhere is a part of everywhere else, America, London, Kashmir (Rushdie, Shalimar 37), what is missing or has been ignored from our cognition of contemporary realities? What are the characters looking for during their migration from the past to the present, from their lost paradises to the new utopian vision? To better understand how Rushdie applies spatial production of irretrievable paradises to represent his reinterpretation of lost ideals in the age of mass migration, I turn to Henri Lefebvre’s triad of space. Refuting the idea that space is either a stable object or a mental concept, Lefebvre proposes a new tripartite and dialectical concept of space in The Production of Space (1974), suggesting that we see space as a tripartite concept, including spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces, rather than a neutral receiver or container. Lefebvre claims that we do not live in an absolute and materialist world and that individuals’ experience of making use of space may provide different perspectives from what we learn from familiar dominant discourses. Furthermore, we need to consider those who will make use of space, since it is their everyday life experience that will offer new possibilities of seeing space. Even though Lefebvre’s conception of space is mainly.

(13) Lin 7. based on his observation and research on cities, his triad of space will still provide insightful perspectives to examine Rushdie’s spatial representations of the two different paradises in Shalimar the Clown. How do people memorize, historicize, or experience the loss of paradises and Kashmiriyat? What kind of spatial representations the characters present in their attempt to retrieve their lost paradises? It is the dialectical relations among spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces in the spatial production of the two places that will help us understand “how this whole relational world of experience and information gets internalized within the particular subject” (Harvey, “Space” 128). In light of Lefebvre’s triad of space and his elaboration on the resistant force coming from representational spaces, I argue that Rushdie tries to foreground the message that there are more possibilities of interpreting our contemporary realities. By representing the gap between people’s cognition and experience of space, the author attempts to resist the imposed violence that may induce or force us to believe one specific explanation of what our world is like. What messages does the author try to convey through his ongoing writing project of paradises in Shalimar the Clown? Why and how does Rushdie relate an assassination in Los Angeles to disturbance in a remote village in Kashmir? What can be inferred from Rushdie’s parallel between a Kashmiri village and an American metropolis? Before discussing the spatial production in Shalimar the Clown with Lefebvre’s triad of space, I shall explore the author’s Kashmiri background and his cosmopolitan attitude toward changing spaces, migration and his writing. By teasing out the author’s life trajectories and his all-inclusive cultural vision, it might become clearer for readers to see how two explosive changes in Rushdie’s life shape his thoughts of encountering violence and how Rushdie represents the concept of Kashmiriyat in his description of two different.

(14) Lin 8. types of paradise.. Searching for the Lost Kashmiriyat Salman Rushdie and His Indian/Kashmiri Background Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in June 1947, two months before the independence of India, a result of the partition of the Indian subcontinent after the British government’s retreat from the colonial India, which led to the concomitant, endless insurgencies. Although Rushdie left the island in his adolescenthood and once stated that Bombay would no longer be the place that he wished to live in if he could have gone back to India (Haffenden 232), India’s story remains hovering in his mind.5 What he has acquired from the country has been rooted in his mind, and such perception shapes his thoughts on the image of India and adjacent area, Kashmir. Having lived in the city of Bombay, Rushdie’s family is probably more than being Muslim. The city of Bombay, being the earliest westernized and modernized city in India, drew people of different colors, languages, cultures or ethnicities to it and cultivated its own unique Bombayness in its metropolitan character, which makes cultural diversity its emblematic feature. Bombay was a “courtly, open, hilly seaside city” (Haffenden 232) in Rushdie’s childhood. He was sent to England to study at Rugby School and at King’s College, Cambridge since 1961. This life-long migration to different places has been mentioned in one of his many interviews: “I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer to two (England, where I lived, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will)” (Haffenden 232). His family moved to Karachi, Pakistan in 1964 because of the increasing hostility. In “A Dream of Glorious Return,” Rushdie refers to the importance of India in shaping his thoughts: “my characters have frequently flown west from India, but in the novel after novel their author’s imagination has returned to it. This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never really leave” (Step 195). 5.

(15) Lin 9. between India and Pakistan, and Rushdie was forced to leave the land of his birth after his father sold their house, Windsor Villa, in Bombay. Rushdie continued his studies in England, but sometimes he would visit the new home of his family in Pakistan during school holidays. Rushdie, who was a Bombayite until 17, “began to develop critical observations about his family’s new homeland” (Sanga 15) and found the city “has almost no urban life because of the repressions in the culture” (Haffenden 233). On the other hand, Rushdie’s fascination about Kashmir recurs in his works. Through his fictional characters, Rushdie reminisces India and lets it recur in different forms. Like what the author usually does in his previous major novels, Rushdie “tease[s] out the roots in places long ago and far away” (Hari) in order for the readers to further understand the backdrop of Shalimar the Clown. In an interview with Jack Livings, Rushdie mentions his familial and literary bond with Kashmir: “My family’s from Kashmir originally, and until now I’ve never really taken it on. The beginning of Midnight’s Children is in Kashmir, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a fairy tale of Kashmir, but in my fiction I’ve never really addressed Kashmir itself.” The author then finally returned to “one remaining thread of his complex cultural inheritance that he had not yet given substantial novelistic treatment” (Teverson) in Shalimar the Clown by setting his novel’s backdrop in the place where his life story begins. For Rushdie, Kashmir was once a perfect trope of the earthly paradise with which Rushdie exhibits a humanistic vision of tolerance. The author’s eclectic and tolerant attitude toward different cultures not only derives from his Europe experience but also comes from the inheritance that has been long existing in India and Kashmiri ancestry. Perhaps to Rushdie’s assassins’ surprise, his grandparents, Attaullah and Ameer Butt, were Kashmiri Muslims (Ahmedi 69), and his grandfather seems to have been a very devout Muslim. Rushdie describes his maternal grandfather as a man of religious.

(16) Lin 10. piety and tolerance: Unlike my father, my maternal grandfather was a devout man, who said his prayers five times a day throughout his life, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was also a man of infinite sweetness, tolerance and patience, who taught his brood of grandchildren that there were to be no limits, in his presence, on what could and could not be discussed. . . . Openness: it was always openness with Dr. Butt. And we learned from that twinkle in his eyes that it was all right to push, and test, and try to open the universe a little more, even before we knew how. (“Freedom”) According to Johann Hari, Rushdie’s maternal grandfather Dr. Attaullah Butt represents “an alternate Islam” that is different from the one of Khomeinist or Bin Ladenite. Openness and tolerance are the inheritance that Rushdie’s Muslim grandfather taught him and what he observed in Kashmir. From his Kashmiri grandfather, he learnt Islam is “a religion of peace, not a religion of pieces” (Hari) and that Kashmir is the space of tolerance, not the space of violence. The alternate Islam and space of tolerance will become important motifs in many Rushdie’s works, which suggest that there are more possibilities of imagining Islam, India, and our ways of life. In his speech for India Today Conclave 2010, Rushdie indicates that the cultural openness that he has been pursuing throughout his life is not an imposed idea from the west but the essence of India that has long been deprived of.6 People in India once possessed that quality, but it is diminishing with the partition of the nation. Therefore, “…the idea of cultural openness which I am here to commend to you, and which has been of such importance to me always, is an idea given to me in India, by Indians, an idea with old Indian roots, valued in every Indian community. This is no alien idea being foisted on India by outsiders. It is our heritage as Indians, integral to our own culture, and we must preserve it or lose some essential part of ourselves” (“Freedom”). 6.

(17) Lin 11. the loss of paradises not only refers to the disappearance of the material part of the landscape in general but also implies the fading of the spirit that the district was proud of before. As Rushdie puts it in Shalimar the Clown: “To be a Kashmiri, to have received so incomparable a divine gift, was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided” (83). This perhaps becomes one of the reasons that Rushdie revisits Kashmir and tells the story of a village’s destruction in the novel: to tell a Kashmiri story, in which Rushdie tells of how people from different parts of the world are eager for retrieving Kashmiriyat, the spirit of tolerance, in their search of space of tolerance.. Kashmir Conflicts and fatwa Migration has long been regarded as a distinct feature in Rushdie’s life and his literary works. According to Jaina Sanga, “the condition of migration usually refers to either a voluntary or involuntary displacement from one’s native country, due to, among other things, war, disease, famine, or other natural disasters, or economic reasons”(14). Rushdie’s life of migration can be traced back to his childhood, but the experience of fleeing from his homeland and the loss of Kashmiriyat have more to do with 1989, “the year of the real explosion in Kashmir and the year in which there was an explosion in [his] life” (Rushdie, Interview 2005). The two explosions refer to the insurgencies and intensified conflicts with bomb blasts in Kashmir since 1989 and the proclamation of fatwa after Rushdie’s publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, both of which represent the loss of a culturally and religiously harmonious life in Kashmir and Rushdie’s freedom of speech. As seen in the previous discussion of his various depictions of Kashmir, the peaceful vision of Kashmir is actually a symbol of tolerance for Rushdie, while the two events in 1989 prove its inaccessibility to him.

(18) Lin 12. and force the writer to rethink the issue of violence and intolerance from an all-inclusive and eclectic position in his later description of Kashmir as a place that preserves the most precious part of human beings. Kashmir conflicts have been considered an epitome of the consequences of the partition and Independence of India. Pankaj Mishra points out that “[t]he dispute over Kashmir, the biggest unfinished business of partition, committed countries with mostly poor and illiterate populations to a nuclear arms race and nourished extremists in both countries: Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, Hindu nationalists in India” (“Exit”). The disputed election in 1987 resulted in a rise in militancy and the return of trained militants from Pakistan. The rights and freedom of Kashmir Hindus were said to be restricted and the conflicts in Kashmir intensified.7 Bomb blasts in Kashmir intensified militancy, which led to the dwindling population of Hindu Pandits and the migration to refugee camps in Jammu or dispersion in northern India. Though the tension between India and Pakistan has decreased after nearly two decades of conflicts in Kashmir and the disputed territory is now administered by India, Pakistan, and the People's Republic of China respectively, the troops around the territory and borders and series of protests in Jammu and Kashmir reveal the unrest in this area. The space of tolerance that Rushdie learned from his grandfather and the old Indian roots has been turned into the space of violence and arm forces. If Kashmir could have been regarded as an earthly paradise, it has been smashed into pieces and the writer cannot return to the place any more. On the other hand, the metaphorical explosion falling on Rushdie, the proclamation of fatwa issued after his publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, also triggered a great disturbance and threats to the writer, which totally changed his life According to the report “Seven killed in Kashmir Explosion” on BBC NEWS, “more than 60,000 people have been killed in Indian-administered Kashmir since 1989 when an armed insurgency began against Indian rule” and Islamist militants organized acts of ethnic cleansing. 7.

(19) Lin 13. from migratory to exilic8. Because of the blasphemous reference to Muhammad and Islamism in the novel, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the political and religious leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against the author, which forced Rushdie to seek for asylum from the British government and began his life in hiding. The unexpected loss in the years of fatwa not only literally drew Rushdie from the land of his birth but culturally led him to an “in-between” position. He does not belong to the countries that offer shelter to him, either. For some critics, he is “a partial outsider to both” (Dascălu 2) and does not transcend them. That is, Rushdie chooses to stay in a detached position from either culture, telling stories in double bind situations in his own artistic space.. Reclamation and Reinvention of What Has Been Lost Both Kashmir conflicts and the Rushdie affair expel Rushdie from his homeland and his ideal world. The geographical displacement and psychological disruption prompt Rushdie to further deliberate on his position as a cosmopolitan writer or a “cultural eclecficist”9, who does not dwell on a stable and fixed point but embraces different cultures. The complexities of diasporic identities usually make writers like Rushdie caught in-between. After more than ten years of hiding, “the tug-of-war between ‘here’ and ‘there’” (Rushdie, Step 294) has been turned into simply what the novelist himself calls the “unbelonging.” “This unbelonging—I think of it as disorientation, loss of the East—is my artistic country now” (294). It is in that artistic country that the writer can keep writing without restraints, reclaiming his loss of or The wording of exilic here only refers to Rushdie’s experience of hiding and seeking for asylum from other countries, indicating the unexpected loss of his connection with India and the Kashmiriyat spirit that he inherited from his grandfather and old Indian tradition under the threat of fatwa. Some critics regard Rushdie as an exilic writer because he no longer lives in India after the years of hiding, while many critics claim that Rushdie is more cosmopolitan than exilic as the author apparently enjoys the condition of belonging nowhere and pursue the space of all-inclusiveness. Therefore, the image of homeland/India in Rushdie’s works is also transformed into a trope of the loss of spirits of tolerance and inclusiveness rather than a root for the writer. 9 In Jung Su’ review of The Moor’s Last Sigh, she argues that Rushdie celebrates “cultural eclecticism,” “which is mainly based on a hybrid, syncretic mixture of different cultural elements” (211). 8.

(20) Lin 14. his restoration of histories, especially when the East or the beautiful homeland is no longer accessible to the writer. For such irremediable loss of the past and the futility of regaining it in the future, there seems to be nothing left for us to grasp at present. The present might be composed of illusion, dogma, or a great system of imposed knowledge that we find no attachment to it. What can a writer do if he finds the loss is irretrievable and the loss is considered natural? In an interview with Günter Grass, Rushdie argues that the fiction is telling the truth at a time in which the people who claimed to be telling the truth were making things up. You have politicians, or the media or whoever, the people who form opinion, who are, in fact, making the fictions. And it becomes the duty of the writer of fiction to start telling the truth. This is a kind of paradox which perhaps, is true of many countries now. (“Fictions” 73-74) Even though our understanding of space, histories and the world are greatly influenced by institutions of power or knowledge, we still have our own perception of the world. The ability of an artist, or the task of an artist, is to articulate and to manifest the world from another angle of spaces and histories by foregrounding what human beings have perceived or experienced. Justyna Deszcz asserts that what Rushdie manages to present in his novels is what has been “marginalized or obliterated,” and that “any tale, including official and predominant versions of history, are open to reinterpretations” (43). Rushdie’s reinvention of stories is virtually the reclamation of what has been ignored in the past, present, and very probably, in the future. In recalling “Ten Years of the Fatwa” in 1999, Rushdie proclaimed that “I’ll go on. A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest,.

(21) Lin 15. most startling dreams” (Step 294). The experience of fatwa and Kashmir conflicts do not hinder his writing career; rather, they reinforce his will to go deeper to the issues of violence and intolerance, both of which have great impact on Kashmir and his life. Rushdie calls for our resistance against violence, because “[t]o appease violence only ensures that such violence will be used more frequently in the future. To surrender to the threat of violence is to damage one’s own moral fibre” (“Freedom”). Refusing to surrender to violence, Rushdie suggests that the correct response is “to demonstrate that violence is counter-productive, and that when we are threatened, we are not afraid. That we can stand our ground against the men of violence and force them to retreat” (“Freedom”). The two explosive events in 1989, Kashmir conflicts and the fatwa affair, can be seen as the consequences of the loss of Kashmiriyat, spirit of tolerance, and the extreme of love and hatred. The beautiful and peaceful Kashmir, once India’s fairyland and his belief of human beings’ capacity of tolerance, now falls preys to the “successive Indian and Pakistani governments, all of them more less venal and corrupt, mouthing the self-serving hypocrisies of power while ordinary Kashmiris suffered the consequences of their posturing” (Rushdie, Step 305). On the other hand, even though the fatwa affair looks more like a personal issue, for Rushdie, it also represents a form of violence toward human rights and the freedom of a writer. The unexpected deprival of Kashmiriyat is carried within the writer and becomes Rushdie’s trope of the lamentable loss of paradise. As a writer, what Rushdie can do to resist the violence that has imposed on him is reclaim and reinvent what he has been deprived of through writing. Therefore, the perished paradise Pachigam and disillusion of cosmopolitan vision of Los Angeles that Rushdie describes in Shalimar the Clown can be read as an.

(22) Lin 16. extended project of writing paradise lost. Through the lenses of characters who are living or connected to those places, Rushdie portrays the perspectives of those who have been absent from dominant discourses on terrorism and “the visible but unseen spaces of contemporary realities” (Tygstrup 199),10 encouraging his readers to rethink what is disappearing behind the loss of paradises and to reimagine what our world could be like without the constraints of specific discourses. Rushdie has been working on the vision of paradises or paradises lost. Perhaps, just like what the title of Shalimar the Clown implies, the author himself is also walking on a tight rope while he chooses to reinvent the essence of Kashmiriyat in his literary works. Because of his attempt to say something different from the dominant or hegemonic discourses on religions or politics, he has been encountered with death threats or restrictions as the punishment for his rebellious expression of thoughts. His writing project is similar to walking on the tight rope, a performance that is full of danger and risks. However, to resist violence or fabricated facts, we need to become our own guardian angels so as to unravel realities and to push the boundaries as much as we can. Dwelling in fabricated dreams will not give us the chance to retrieve what we have lost. In search of Kashmiriyat, we need to take risks to know the world outside the pre-determined boundaries and to speak for those silenced. In this way, we may be able to regain what we once possessed and to learn more possibilities of what our world should be or could be like.. Shalimar the Clown: A Story of Irretrievable Paradises. 10. In his review of Shalimar the Clown, Federik Tygstrup argues that Rushdie has been dedicating himself to examining our present spaces by “insisting on accepting the full consequences of the way in which spaces are changing around us, something which we might intellectually acknowledge albeit without being able to actually imagine what it entail” (199). Therefore, the histories of Rushdie’s fictions usually take place in spaces of radical changes, which defy our perception of the world and unfold the unseen parcels in our daily life..

(23) Lin 17. That’s all gone now, and even if there’s a peace treaty tomorrow it’s not coming back, because the thing that was smashed, which is what I tried to write about, is the tolerant, mingled culture of Kashmir. After the way the Hindus were driven out, and the way the Muslims have been radicalized and tormented, you can’t put it back together again. I wanted to say: It’s not just a story about mountain people five or six thousand miles away. It’s our story, too. --Salman Rushdie, Interview with Livings When talking about the reason why he writes a story about Kashmir, Rushdie argues that Kashmir is lost even though people may have tried to alleviate the militancy there. The harmonious landscape of which Rushdie was informed by his grandfather is lost. The tolerant and multicultural community is lost. Even if someone attempts to rebuild a similar community at the original location, it is no longer the one people are looking for, because what is actually lost in the conflicts is the spirit that was shared by everyone in the district: Kashmiriyat. The loss of paradises therefore refers to the loss of that spirit. In this way, not only will people in Kashmir experience such dramatic changes in their lives, but people like us will also perceive similar landscapes in our own places. The parallel between two different types of paradises, Pachigam and Los Angeles, implies the fact that Rushdie applies a Kashmiri story of lost paradises to speak for our stories. The story of Shalimar the Clown begins in 1990s Los Angeles with an assassination of a former American ambassador, Maximilian Ophuls, who fought in the French resistance against the Nazi during the Second World War and was appointed as an ambassador to India and an unspecified agent in American interests in Asia. Max is depicted as a representative of America’s counterterrorism. The.

(24) Lin 18. assassination is conducted by Max’s Muslim driver Shalimar from Kashmir, who is thought of as a professional terrorist related to Jihad. However, the assassination is later discovered a personal revenge as well as the outcome of the U.S.’s policy in the east, which draws readers back to 1965 Kashmir, a more harmonious fictitious village where Shalimar lived with his wife Boonyi. When Max served as the American ambassador to India, he met Boonyi. With Max’s infatuation with her, Boonyi seized the opportunity to escape from her confining village Pachigam in Kashmir. However, Max lost his passion for Boonyi by the height of the Vietnam War, so Boonyi was sent back to Pachigam alone. Her daughter, Kashmira, was taken away by Max’s wife to the UK and was renamed India.11 Because of Boonyi’s betrayal, Shalimar started his journey of revenge to kill Boonyi, Max, and their illegitimate daughter. Supported by the U.S. allies during the Cold War, Shalimar trained as a professional terrorist. The disgrace of her wife’s betrayal and the destruction of his village by Indian troops make Shalimar transform himself and start the journey of revenge. The story is like a transnational epic narrative, and each chapter with one specific character’s name presenting readers the story with different perspectives. Shalimar the Clown could be regarded as the first novel that Rushdie directly and vividly describes the condition of Kashmir, and it also touches upon the issue of terrorist attacks. Published in 2005 and depicting an assassination conducted by a man related to the terrorist organization, the novel gains great attention from the public and inevitably reminds its readers of the September 11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001, even though the novel is actually not a post-9/11 fiction in terms of its setting.12 From the. Therefore, I will use India/Kashmira while talking about the Max’s daughter in Shalimar the Clown so as to distinguish the name of the character from that of the nation. 12 A post-9/11 fiction usually takes the September 11 terrorist attacks as its background, and there have been a great number of works trying to describe the world after the September 11 attacks. However, the year of Max’s assassination falls in 1991. Even so, many critics still regard Shalimar the Clown as a post-911 fiction. Jason Cowley points out that “a celebrant of post-colonial hybridity and diversity, of 11.

(25) Lin 19. Second World War to the terrorist attacks during the 2000s, from the smash of Kashmir to the disillusion of Los Angeles dream, the story of violence and betrayal and Rushdie’s portrayal of lost paradise have been situated in a broader transnational and global context. In reality, after the September 11 attacks, many governments start their wars on terrorism, including “the control of immigration, as well as the criminalization of Islam” (Morton 338). Gradually, there tends to be a binary opposition between terrorism and counter-terrorism, while Muslims or migrants are usually associated with the former. From a rather different point of view, Pei-Chen Liao finds “in representing familiar ambivalence between present and past, self-protection and self-destruction, and friend and enemy at both the political and personal levels, Rushdie deconstructs the dominant post-9/11 perception that terror comes solely from essentially evil terrorism and terrorists” (29). Instead of taking the novel as merely a story of terrorism versus anti-terrorism, Liao suggests that Shalimar the Clown be anchored in a broader implication of 9/11 and what the novel emphasizes is “the terrifying consequence of the existential distinction between friend and enemy and that of self-ignorance of strangers within” (77). The assassination does not result from essential differences among the characters. It is the extreme expression of love and hatred, intolerance and violence that leads to the murder and the destruction. To divide people into Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans and non-Americans can only make the country in an unending disturbing or even militancy situation. Prompted by the tension between terrorism and counter-terrorism that has been existing in many countries, Rushdie attempts to transform an American story of counter-terrorism into a Kashmiri story of intolerance, which unfolds what is cultural fusion and mergings, Rushdie is here grappling imaginatively with the shock of 11 September 2001 and the wars that have followed.” In “The Political is Personal,” Peter Heinegg also states that Shalimar the Clown is an enthralling story in that the “sprawling story flashes back and forth from pre-World War II Strasbourg to present-day Los Angeles, touches at least fleetingly on every major world crisis from the Holocaust to 9/11.”.

(26) Lin 20. happening around the assassination besides the rigid impression of a terrorist attack. The Kashmiri perspective will allow the author to stand away from those two extreme standing points and to blur the established boundaries between the two different political or religious groups. Another important figure of the novel lies in the motif of migration. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie offers a detailed portrait of destruction of an earthly Edenic place and recounts an assassination in Los Angeles. Furthermore, while recounting the main characters’ life trajectories, the story reaches England, France, Philippine, and other places around the world. Global migration plays a vital role in the novel. Since most characters in the novel possess the experience of migration, Shao-ming Kung interprets Shalimar the Clown as “an invocative archive of migration and globalized production of modern terrorism, which articulates the present with counter-public, minor perspective of the 1947 Partition” (84). The story presents the issues related to migration with perspectives of those who cannot dominate the power and the right to speak in dominant discourses. To look at the story from other possible perspectives will provide us opportunities to reexamine and rethink the established facts. In an interview with Rushdie, Johann Hari proposes that Rushdie sees his career as falling into three acts. In the first, he wrote about his lost homelands—India and Pakistan. Then he wrote about the transition from that world to Britain, the journey across water to the West. “And now I think that the third act is to say, ‘All right, all that happened,’” [Rushdie] explains. “The world has become this mixed up place, the age of mass migration has taken place and we live in its aftermath - now what?” In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie deliberates on the influence of migration and.

(27) Lin 21. globalization. “The crossing of borders, during the twentieth century, whatever the motives, origins, and destinations, has become an extremely significant issue since more and more people are affected by it” (Sanga 14). Shalimar the Clown unfolds an alternative perspective on it. The novel thus becomes a story connecting the previous two acts that Rushdie worked on before, moving beyond talking about lost homelands and new lives in the west respectively but focusing on the interrelating network in the age of migration and the common experience of losing paradises shared by the rural village and the metropolis. Rushdie indicates that “I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the consequences of migration. Now I'm being forced to see that there's a nightmare as well as a dream" (Hari). Migration can provide possibilities, but it can also bring problems or challenges. Whether the consequences of migration are good or not, we all need to respond to them, as the influence is so prevailing that we cannot escape it. Shalimar the Clown reveals how residents respond to the upcoming insurgencies and how immigrants relate themselves to the outside world in a globalization of violence and migration. Migration allows migratory characters to bring their historical narratives to merge into the new lands. Their spatial representations will show us the changes of space as well. To read the production of space is to see the development of social relations. Focusing on Rushdie’s mapping of the territorial relations that are inscribed in spaces, Frederik Tygstrup argues that Rushdie exemplifies the change of our spatial practice in terms of “territorial order, deterritorializing tendencies, and reterritorializing practices” (199). According to Tygstrup, the transformation of our spatial practice is “a necessary outcome of migration and migratory characters” (204). Boonyi leaves her hometown to search for more freedom and possibilities in the new place. People move from their perished paradises to the new utopian visions. India/Kashmira visits Kashmir to retrieve the.

(28) Lin 22. traces of her mother and her untold stories. In their migration, they all try to find something that they think may exist in their destinations. On the other hand, their migration reconfigures spatial imagination of the residents and readers, bringing more possibilities and challenges to spatial production of their living space. Spatial representations in the novel thus become an interesting topic. Gavin Keulks suggests that spaces in Shalimar the Clown are endowed with more significant intensions in Rushdie’s revaluation of post-modernism and postcolonialism. According to Keulks, the fictitious village Pachigam is where “the magic didn’t work, the real world refused to be banished” (Rushdie, Shalimar 369) while Los Angeles has “no mysteries here or depth” (Rushdie, Shalimar 5). It is an interesting comparison between Pachigam and Los Angeles in light of Keulks’ article. Perhaps the two paradises that Rushdie portrays in Shalimar the Clown look different in terms of their spatial practice, but both of them indicate the fact that the realities do not want to be banished or forgotten. Without knowing what actually happens around us, there will be no depth or meaning of space. Therefore, Rushdie’s description of Pachigam and Los Angeles can be seen as a call to urge his readers to pay attention to what is happening in Kashmir, in Los Angeles, and in our lives. In John Updike’s review of Shalimar the Clown, he argues that the novel actually describes the ruination of two paradises: California and Kashmir: . . . the former [California] by “human bloat” in the shape of trailer parks and “the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes” and the “less pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl…the dirty underbelly of paradise,” and the latter [Kashmir] by Islamic uprising and the matched savagery of the insurgency’s attempted suppression by the government of India..

(29) Lin 23. In Updike’s point of view, California and Kashmir represent different forms of paradise lost respectively in Shalimar the Clown. Kashmir is considered a pastoral paradise destroyed by the constant insurgency on the subcontinent due to political and military power struggle, while California embodies the disillusion of Pleasantville image of Los Angeles. Though they seem different in the beginning and do not receive the same attention from the world, readers will soon find similarities in the collapse of their paradisiacal images. Their memories keep getting into each other’s histories. Furthermore, both Pachigam and Los Angeles are endowed with people’s hope of retrieving something lost, such as the hope of regaining their harmonious multi-ethnic and multi-cultural village, the hope of living in a place with no fear of death. It is in how Rushdie intertwines his personal experience with the two paradises that we find the buried stories of those silenced. Both Pachigam and Los Angeles are not merely settings or geographical terms of little importance in the novel. The spatial production of these two places represents our changing social relations. According to Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, “such paradises will have to become either virtual or portable images,” which encourages us to “envision a new and better future by having intimations of transcendental beauty and bliss” (45). However, the author does not create a fantasy for his characters to rest upon. Instead of creating an alternative wonderful utopia in the novel, Rushdie reinvents the valley of Pachigam, a smashed paradise in militancy and a sad epitome of the lost Kashmir and Kashmiriyat. Some critics, such as Celia Wallhead, regard Kashmir as an emblem of “flawed Eden” (91). What happens in Pachigam will appear in Los Angeles as well. The two places look quite similar for some characters. Through their perspectives, we see a different imagination of the village and the city. The portrayal of intensifying agitation and conflicts in Pachigam unfolds the unending.

(30) Lin 24. disturbances in Kashmir, while India/Kashmira’s observation of the city poses a challenge against the Pleasantville vision of Los Angeles. They are no longer paradises. By paralleling the fictitious village Pachigam with Los Angeles, Rushdie is able to foreground the issue of intolerance and the loss of Kashmiriyat hidden behind the story of terror. Anchoring my research in Henri Lefebvre’s triad of space, I read Rushdie’s parallelism of Pachigam and Los Angeles as an emblem of lost paradises and the disappearing space of tolerance. By examining representational spaces of inhabitants, I attempt to find out the elements that make both places irretrievable paradises and the relation between two different representations of paradises. In this way, we may have a clearer picture of what Rushdie actually tries to articulate in his portrayal of lost paradises. Therefore, my thesis will be divided into the following parts. In chapter two, I try to investigate into Lefebvre’s triad of space and his elaboration on resistance force from representational spaces. In chapter three, I will focus on spatial representations of the fictitious village in Kashmir, Pachigam, in order to examine its transformation from a harmonious village into a smashed paradise in terror and to tease out how people experience and memorize its destruction. In chapter four, I turn to its counterpart, Los Angeles, to see how migration brings alternate narratives into the city of angels and how India/Kashmira’s documentary project exemplifies her efforts to resist imposed knowledge and violence. In the final concluding chapter of the thesis, I would like to tease out the common features shared by the two places and examine Rushdie’s intention of writing lost paradises and his reflection on encountering violence in Shalimar the Clown..

(31) Lin 25. Chapter Two Resistant Force of Representational Spaces Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice. —bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics 152 Henri Lefebvre’s Triad of Space In the 1970s, seeing space as a product in The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre devises a triad of space: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces and argues that “if space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production” (Lefebvre 36). According to Stuart Elden, “[b]y production, Lefebvre means both the strictly economic production of things, but also the larger philosophical concept, the production of oeuvres, the production of knowledge, of institutions, of all that constitutes society” (94). If we meditate on space in terms of production, we may find out that we are actually investigate into a complex aggregation of our daily activities, knowledge, power, relationships and many other things that are connected with our interaction and imagination of life and our social relations. In Lefebvre’s triad of space, he attempts to break the rigid binary opposition between mind and body. Being considered a product, space embodies multiple relationships. Lefebvre puts more emphasis on the relation between our everyday activities and space. According to Lefebvre, “space embodies social relationships” (27) and it is said to “embrace a multitude of intersections” (33). In Lefebvre’s conception of space, it is fundamental that space is socially produced in a specific context. The three levels of space are dialectical and interrelated. Space is “a production process.

(32) Lin 26. that takes place in terms of three dialectically interlinked dimensions” (Schmid 40), so “a social space includes not only a concrete materiality but a thought concept and a feeling—an ‘experience’” (41). In other words, Lefebvre’s conception of production of space is a three-dimensional dialectical unity, and each dimension cannot exist without the others. For example, the experience with which representational spaces are strongly connected comes from “the materiality of the body on which it is based” and “the thought that structures and expresses it” (41). I would elaborate the idea of three dimensions of space in the following paragraphs. Firstly, spatial practice is perceived space, which will be and “can only be evaluated empirically” “through the deciphering of its space” (Lefebvre 38). People can perceive the material space by their senses, which is not confined to physical objects but everything “that presents itself to the senses; not only seeing but hearing, smelling, touching, tasting” (Schmid 39). Therefore, spatial practice is related to “the everyday social/spatial patterns of people in particular spaces” (Liggett 249). In other words, spatial practice refers to activities, interactions, and patterns that people perceive empirically in their daily life, “the system resulting from articulation and connection of elements or activities” (Schmid 36). Secondly, representations of space can be seen as conceived space which is conceptualized and established by people or institutions of power and knowledge such as “scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent” (Lefebvre 38). Usually, maps, administrative planning and “production of knowledge” (Schmid 41) will be denoted as representations of space. Thirdly, representational spaces are considered “directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of 'inhabitants' and 'users', but.

(33) Lin 27. also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe” (39). Instead of obeying the rules of consistency and cohesive, representational spaces, as lived space, embody the space that people live with “their source in history—in the history of a people as well as in the history of each individual belonging to that people” (41). For Lefebvre, “the user’s space is lived” (362). Compared with conceived space (space of architects, scientists, or any other experts), it is more subjective. “As a space of ‘subjects’ rather than of calculations, as a representational space, it has an origin, and that origin is childhood, with its hardships, its achievements, and its lacks” (362). Therefore, representational spaces are always linked to the user’s own source of histories and memories, which will bear resistance to the institutionalized system. Though the title of The Production of Space might mislead readers into thinking that Lefebvre seems to put more emphasis on “space” alone, Lefebvre himself does not overlook the significance of time and historicity. In fact, he proposes that there would be a new perspective on looking history while seeing space as a product. “History would have to take in not only the genesis of these spaces but also, and especially, their interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interactions, and their links with the spatial practice of the particular society or mode of production under consideration” (Lefebvre 42). Apparently, time plays a significant role in shaping our production of space. Lefebvre’s triad of space should not be simply taken as a plane consisting of three different points; instead, history intervenes in our spatial production. The historicity of space will influence how the space is perceived, conceived and experienced. Frederik Tygstup, echoing Lefebvre’s triad of space, indicates that the historicity of space is expressed through the stratifications that give.

(34) Lin 28. it its individual form: the way it is built, the ways it is conceived of and conceptualized, the ways it is experienced. The experience of space and the appropriation of space will inevitably have to come about as a negotiation with one’s predecessors over how this space was used and was made to be used. (202) In different historical periods, we will present different forms of spatial practice and come up with varied representations of space on the basis of different stories or histories that lie in or converge at the place. The place is endowed with the historical traces or characteristics of its time at the moment, and we will have our own interpretations and ways of experiencing the place. As time goes by, the stratifications formed in different historical periods will construct the layers of space that people perceive, conceive and live. Our interaction with the place becomes a continuous dialogue with the past, whether it is of the place or of our own. We negotiate with what the space was supposed to become and how ancestors actually made use of it. Each of us has our own practice, understanding and interpretation of the space in our time. Users of the place express and experience the space with their own imagination. Space is materially, emotively, and affectively lived (Harvey 131) with people’s own sources of histories, memories and experiences. Therefore, space is not just a container to be filled with metaphors. Space itself is a product and a historical result of our social relations, thoughts, ways of life, and expressions. Therefore, one’s experience of space comes along with how space was/is actually used and how it was planned to be used. The three different stratifications of space may not always be consistent with each other, but they shape the production of space. Therefore, Lefebvre’s triad of space should not be considered a theory that only puts emphasis on space. Instead, we find time and historicity play an essential role in the production of.

(35) Lin 29. space. There have been many researchers inspired by Lefebvre’s spatial theories and coming up with more detailed discussions on space-time relationship. In David Harvey’s spatial researches, he follows up Lefebvre’s conception of space and divides Lefebvre’s each dimension of spatial production into three more subtle categories so as to see how time and space influence each other in Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production, which will help us further understand how Lefebvre’s spatial theory can be applied into the formation of collective memories. In “Space as a Key Word,” Harvey elaborates on a tripartite division of space: absolute space, relative space, and relational space. Harvey’s concept is generally supposed to complement Lefebvre’s triad of space, giving more examples and details about each dimension of Lefebvre’s triad of space. In this way, he forms a matrix of spatial categories and provides more possibilities of spatial imaginations. According to Harvey, absolute space refers to “the space of Newton and Descartes and it is usually represented as a pre-existing and immovable grid amenable to standardized measurement and open to calculation” (“Space” 321); streets and urban planning will be taken into consideration here. Relative space suggests space of Einstein and non-Euclidean, which is mainly connected with spatio-temporal frameworks, the relativization of time, space and observers, such as flow of capital, thematic maps, and anxiety of getting late. The space of relative concept is usually associated with distances, measurement of time, and relationships between objects. The third spatial concept, relational space, that Harvey proposes is “embedded in or internal to process” (123), space of Leibniz. According to Harvey, “there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them” (123). That is, “external influences get internalized in specific processes or things through time”.

(36) Lin 30. (124). Even though the material space seems fixed and stable, it actually embodies all the events, objects, relations, and processes through time, which gives the space meanings. Space entails relational presence in the world, and the presence bears different meanings to different people. Therefore, the world cannot be understood only at one specific point. In Harvey’s matrix of space, he puts much attention to relational space, with which he attempts to understand political, economic and environmental forces of spaces, especially “the political role of collective memories in urban processes” (125). In fact, relational space can be seen as a detailed elaboration on Lefebvre’s conception of time-space relationship. Since relational space puts emphasis on how external factors are being internalized in things through time, it bears the weight of histories and memories. According to Lefebvre, space should not be merely regarded as a frame that contains architectures, activities, and people but as a subject that is composed of spatial practice and life forms, patterns and knowledge, and symbols and imaginations. Space has a relational presence in the world, whether it is perceived, conceived, or lived. Different from absolute and relative space, a relational perspective on space will see space as a congealment of threads of time-space. “A wide variety of disparate influences swirling over space in past, present and future concentrate and congeal at a certain point to define the nature of that point” (Harvey, “Space” 124). Individuals bring experiences, affections or ideas of their life trajectories into the space they are using, producing their own spatial experience. What makes conceived space and lived space different is each individual user’s reconstruction of what they have perceived and conceived in their everyday experience. Lefebvre proposes that users of space have their own feelings or interpretations of the space, and Harvey.

(37) Lin 31. divides the inhabitants’ experience of the space into three categories. The sense of security or the thrill of getting into an unknown place would be regarded as absolute or relative since they are mainly related to the standpoint of the user. In his matrix of spatialities, Harvey puts memories, dreams, fantasies, utopian dreams and desire in the column of combination of representational spaces and relational space, which contains affections or thoughts nurtured by the user’s past, present and future simultaneously. Here, the past, present and future are not confined to the space that is being used. They might be also related to places far away. In other words, time and space from different sources are congealed in space. Harvey takes “Ground Zero” for example. He suggests that if we only understand “Ground Zero” from absolute or relative points of view, we might merely have a glimpse of how engineering calculations and aesthetic measurement help reconstruct the material space to produce emotive effects. However, “[w]hatever is built at this site has to say something about history and memory” (137), and families of those killed at the place or citizens involved in the event might also have their personal interpretations of this site, the event, and the community. They might have something to tell about their future and probably about the possibilities in their life. In other words, they do not merely historicize or memorialize the site but memorize it, making all the things in relation to the site internalized in their process of producing spaces through time. Harvey indicates that there are all manner of relationalities to be explored. What will we know about those who attacked and how far will we connect? The site is and will have a relational presence in the world no matter what is built there and it is important to reflect on how this presencing works: will it be lived as a symbol of US arrogance or as a sign of global.

(38) Lin 32. compassion and understanding? Taking up such matters requires that we embrace a relational conception of space-time. (137) Therefore, “Ground Zero” will definitely bear more than one version of interpretation of the place. The attack and the monument erected after the event do not exist there in isolation. There could be many things connected to the attack, which leads to different interpretations of the event or the place. If we only focus on absolute and relative perspectives, we are likely to impose a fixed narrative on what happened at this site, which might “foreclose on future possibilities and interpretations” (137). If we reexamine our world through a relational perspective, we will be able to reveal new possibilities in the process of producing meanings, as those visible but unseen spaces in the dominant discourses might be able to come present in our rescaling of the boundaries. This is how historicity works in the production of space. The conception of space now becomes more complicated because we are getting involved in different aspects of contemporary realities. Lefebvre’s representational spaces13 urge us to shift our attention to the question “how is it that different human practices create and make use of different conceptualizations of space?” (Harvey, Social 13). Thinking through different perspectives can give us more opportunities to probe into disputed issues and more alternative possibilities. A relational thinking on space invites us to reconsider why people have such feelings or affections toward their spatial experience so that we can further investigate into what has been internalized within the inhabitants during their life trajectories. Their visions, desires, frustrations, dreams, or memories are threads of representational spaces. It is the experience of space-time collected in their life trajectories that influences how these people respond to spatial practice and representations of space at present. 13. It is worth noting that neither of Lefebvre and Harvey treat their triad of spaces hierarchically or foreground specific aspects. Concepts in each set of tripartite division of space entails a dialectical tension with each other..