From ‘Magic’ to ‘Tragic Realism’

Abstract

The year 2013 was the 94th anniversary of the Amritsar massacre in the Jallianwala Bagh, and it was also the year that the film of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children went on general release. The Amritsar atrocity is the first historical event portrayed in the original novel, demonstrating its relevance to the emergence of an independent India, yet – despite its director being born in Amritsar – the movie chooses not to represent the massacre at all. This essay argues that such a symbolic omission hints at a major shift in the politics of Rushdie's newer work: The Enchantress of Florence and Shalimar the Clown are marked by a capitulation in the face of state power that Rushdie fought so hard against in Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. Rushdie has never been only a celebrant of ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling,’ preferring instead to dramatize the conflict between the magic of hybridity and the awful realities of state power, in a technique I dub ‘tragic realism’. In his latest novels, however, Rushdie portrays less and less magic in his worlds, replacing it with more and more sadness about what he sees as the failure of hybridity as a political project in the face of sovereign power and the state of exception.