The metaphysics of migration : on border-crossing and uninhabitable transitory spaces in Salman Rushdie's novels

Abstract

Reading Rushdie’s novels one quickly notices that most of his characters are migrants crossing borders. What happens to these migrant protagonists during their border-crossing and what meaning is given to the borders they cross? Departing from the Lotmanian premise that all action of a novel is linked to a norm defying action violating a certain normative boundary or even a physical border between fictional spaces, this book proposes to conceive of the border in Rushdie’s novels, as more than just a demarcation between places. The border is narratively enlarged to a space: the Uninhabitable Transitory Space of the Border. In this space the characters of Rushdie’s novels change profoundly, reinvent themselves as much as the adjacent places. Hence the Uninhabitable Transitory Space of the Border becomes their space of identity construction. Part of this construction of identities is that unanswerable, metaphysical questions about the human condition are once again asked. Rushdie uses this realm of the imagination to juxtapose different value systems based on various systems of belief. Therefore, the Uninhabitable Transitory Space of the Border permits to question all basic assumptions concerning religious belief and even scientific models like the Big Bang theory – ultimately unveiling science as a secular system of belief in which any assumption may only be held to be true until another assumption takes its place... The world picture of the protagonists is shaken by the profound experience of border-crossing and leads to a critical reevaluation of things otherwise taken for granted. The contents of this book might be of value not only to literary scholars, but also to ethnologists interested in postmodern intertwining of religious and secular world pictures, since it offers a broad study of cross-cultural and interreligious links in Rushdie’s novels.