Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper investigates the extra-textual gap between fiction and reality that exists in the postcolonial works of Salman Rushdie, which extends to the level of fetishism, and distorts the postcolonial reality into a fetish ideology. Postcolonial texts, as subversive literary productions, not only reflect actual events, histories, and traumas, and identify as “texts-in-the world” (Said, 1975), but are also generative, produce beyond these realities, and present the extra-textual. Such extra-textuality “over-describes” phenomenon, events, and society, and fills the unfulfillable that results in a non-represent representation (Zizek, 1995). This extra-textuality of the text, misrecognized by existing ideology, is split between the institutional exterior that dominates and regulates individuals’ life “from above” (fetishism), and the ideology that emerges from the critic/reader as generative apparatuses (ISAs) (Althusser, 1984) that emerge “from below” (Zizek, 1995). By means of content analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, this paper argues that this lacuna of the non-representable over-textuality generated by magical realism highlights the symptomatic “postcolonial condition” of the subject in the aftermath of colonialism. Saleem Sinai’s “third-eye” ability to read the “many minds of India,” and the “gifts” of all the other children (Midnight’s Children), the beastly transformations/behavior of Sufiya Zinobia, daughter of General Razar Hyder (Shame), and the strange things that take place in an otherwise detailed realistic backdrop (The Moor’s Last Sigh) generate that “flight” from reality into extra-textuality that eventually highlights the symptom of the “postcolonial condition” from which emancipation is sought.