R ushdie, S alman

Abstract

Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most conceptually and artistically ambitious writers of literary fiction. He is also a controversialist whose provocative forays into sensitive ideological battlegrounds have resulted in a contentious, and in the case of one novel incendiary, body of fiction. Politics, however, while it is crucial to Rushdie's artistry, is ultimately a secondary concern in his work, for though he has consistently used his fictions to interrogate political and cultural developments, Rushdie is first and foremost a storyteller whose fictions seek to entertain readers with their lush extravagances, their Rabelaisian comedy, their witty denunciations, their gothic depravities, their clever (sometimes overly clever) game playing, their grotesque caricatures, their hyperbolic narrative experiments, and their unfettered sense of the pleasures to be found in language and narration. To read Rushdie is, sometimes, to be overwhelmed – as many of his less sympathetic reviewers have noted with disapproval. Being overwhelmed is, however, a central part of the aesthetic experience that Rushdie seeks to create, for it is Rushdie's view that the world he represents is one that is frequently overwhelming, one that doesn't conform to conventional notions of what is “real,” “normative,” “natural,” or “known,” and one that, as a result, requires an extraordinary aesthetic to do justice to it. “The world,” as Rushdie explained in 1993, “is operatic and surreal and grotesque” – and so the novels he writes are “operatic and surreal and grotesque” too (Chauhan 131).