The literature of exile and imaginary homelands in salman rushdie, bharati mukherjee, and v. s. naipaul - Essay Example

The exile is not (he cannot be, he cannot exist) -- at least in the common Western conception of being -- but is rather the sum of competing and contradictory forces that play out over the surface of the exiles being, without ever constituting a rigid and single edifice. If the exile can be said to have a "being" at all, then, it can only be understood to be one that is based on the formation of certain circumstances, of history, of discourse, of culture--what Walter Benjamin might have called a "constellation.

"1 However, these very structures--history, discourse, culture--can no longer be considered looming edifices of constitutive control and hegemonic power, after the experience of the exile as portrayed in these novels they lose some of their force. For the strange logic of the exile invades these structrues too, works within them too, and they (the structures), like the exile, cannot be considered single, unitary, or stable. The exile steals from them their authority by the power of his or her interruption.

The exile too follow this logic and the structure which both pervades the exiled individual, and which gives him or her the power for resistance. In the preceding analyses of the writings of Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and V. S. Naipaul, I have attempted to chart the trajectory of the logic of the exile as it passes through their writing. I have tried to put into the words (however problematically) the flow of constitution and dissolution that occurs on the boundary of both language and self, and which is what forms the particular literary power of these writers, and determines their placement as writers of the post-colonial situation.

Now, in this conclusion, I would like to situate these various writers back into a dialogue with both the theory and practice of post-colonial scholarship, and attempt to see precisely how the various movements within and between the six texts that I have concentrated upon play themselves out against the wider background of the post-colonial situation. Perhaps more importantly, I wish to cement the argument I speculatively began in the preceding chapters that these three writers, though extremely different in matters of style, material, and/or execution, all present a seriously radical answer to the malaise that the post-colonial situation presents.

They are certainly not, as some critics have presented them, writers who have benefited from the comforts of exile, and have been accepted into the mainstream of their chosen land (for Naipaul, England; for Mukherjee, the United States; for Rushdie, England and the United States ) unproblematically. None of them are conservative, nor are they apolitical. However, they do come to the notion of a post-colonial politics with a new mode of functioning and from a new place of departure. Their politics is not of the old kind, but of a markedly new and total aspect: the target of their revolutionary destruction cannot be put in such simple terms as party, nation or racial groups.

Let us consider the various kinds of exile that make up the cast of characters within Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, The Mimic Men, and The Enigma of Arrival. In all cases these novels concentrate on the personal nature of the central character's exile. In