“Fictions Where a Man Could Live”: Worldlessness Against the Void in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus

Abstract

Read against the industry-inspiring success of his better-known works, Rushdie’s 1975 debut novel Grimus is often regarded as the artistically tentative effort of the author who would, in his maturity, go on to write Midnight’s Children (1981). The relative dearth of critical responses to Grimus in the more than 35 years since its publication seems emphatically to indicate a scholarly consensus, one which, perhaps given the recently recognized emergence of the genre of postcolonial science fiction, invites renewed consideration. Indeed, what if we resist this broadly dismissive critical approach by suggesting that Rushdie’s unique appropriation of SF provides for both a critical/aesthetic intervention — among the very first — into the global order just making itself visible in the mid-1970s and, perhaps more important, for the utopian neutralization of that order? To reposition Grimus within the rich tradition of utopia/SF is therefore to overcome the ideological limits of previous scholarly appraisals and to restore a properly historical context against which the novel’s deep political and pedagogical tendencies — as well as its considerable aesthetic accomplishments — may be fully revealed. What is more, such a recontextualization may cast new light not only on the critical history attending Rushdie’s celebrated body of work but also on that generic line of postcolonial SF in which his first novel, much to the consternation of postcolonial scholars, unapologetically participates.