Magic Mirrors and the (Im)-Possibility of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Salaman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

Magic Mirrors and the (Im)-Possibility of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Salaman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence Nejib Souissi (bio) Reminiscent of the Arabian Nights in its fabulous atmosphere and the overall mediation of reality through fantasy, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence is a “‘historical novel’ that mirrors contemporary sensibilities and apprehensions” (JoAnn Conrad 433). Although set in the hyper-real cities of Mughal Sikri and Italian Florence in the wake of the Renaissance, the novel nicely captures cultural hybridity as an imaginative alternative to the islands of insularity and exclusivity that still entrap humans in our present-day world. The main protagonists, namely Lady Black Eyes, Mogor dell’ Amore, Akbar the Great, and Argalia the Turk, who hail from the discrepant East and West, interact intimately, crystallizing a large-scale allegory of cosmopolitanism. As harbingers of better versions of reality, Rushdie’s characters stretch our imagination to conjure up trajectories that could bridge the gap between presumably distant places and different histories. Apparently, far from being fantastic or strictly utopian, this wide-sweeping vision used to have a historical basis in early modern cross-cultural mobility and exchange, although often taking coercive shapes. From this perspective, Rushdie’s ambitious project consists of mining the historical origins of a possible rapprochement between disparate cultures in a genealogical gesture of retrieval and appropriation that strives to reinvent a different tradition from parochial nationalism. Central among the tropes through which he interprets the world are migration and hybridity, seeking to trace lines of flight out of clear-cut frameworks. Sketched out in these broad terms, Rushdie’s cosmopolitan paradigm falls into line with Johannes Fabian, who castigates the myth of isolated culture gardens by citing Ernest Bloch in the following suggestive lines: The very process of history is broken up into Gardens of Culture or “Culture Souls.” These are as unrelated to each other as they are without connection to Man and human labor (which is the pervading matter of history) or to nature. . . . Quite artfully, historical relativism is here turned into something static; it is being caught in cultural monads, [End Page 41] that is, culture souls without windows, with no links among each other, yet full of mirrors facing inside. (Fabian 44–45; emphasis added) This configuration of inertia and disconnection conveys a picture of windowless cultures fenced off from each other by insurmountable walls of division that ostentatiously boast inward-facing mirrors. Such cultural narcissism, it should be noted, cannot but wreak havoc in the global village we all inhabit today. As Homi Bhabha reminds us: “So long as a firm boundary is maintained between the territories, and the narcissistic wounded is contained, the aggressivity will be projected onto the Other or the outside” (149). To prevent the explosion of identity politics on the world scene that could escalate into the indiscriminate violence of the word or the sword, it appears that narcissistic mirrors should be fractured, or else that the mirrors simply resume some of their fairy-tale magic to usher in Other-worlds. As such, it would be possible for people hailing from distant places in the world to step through the looking glass and explore the marvelous cultural diversity that lies in store for them beyond the imaginary dividing lines, as Rushdie’s fiction attests. The following analysis of Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence shall therefore examine the mirror as a surface of symmetry between the twin cities canvassed in the novel, namely Mughal Sikri and Renaissance Florence, in such a way as to bear out the convivial assumption that the “curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike” (EF 311). However, as cross-cultural contact is never straightforward and mirrors are invariably magical in Rushdie’s fiction, the next move will be to examine how double figures are capable of rebounding duplications, inverted images, and myriad interconnected subjectivities. Such engagement with identities at the shifting margin between cultures is aligned with transnational theories that attempt to liberate our vision from ethnocentric ideas and defeat the violent politics of identity. Indeed, whether a reference is made to Bhabha’s...