The literature of exile and imaginary homelands in salman rushdie, Essay

The literature of deportation and imaginary homelands in salman rushdie, bharati mukherjee, and v. s. naipaul - Essay congressmanThe exile is not (he cannot be, he cannot exist) -- at least in the common Western conception of macrocosm -- 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 on the whole, then, it can only be understood to be one that is based on the formation of authoritative 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 ascertained looming edifices of constitutive(prenominal) control and hegemonic index finger, after the experience of the exile as portrayed in these novels they lose some of their force. For the fantastical logic of the exile invades these structrue s 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 play 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 invest of post-colonial schol arship, and attempt to see precisely how the various movements within and between the six texts that I have backbreaking 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 unite 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 immature mode of functioning and from a new place of depart ure. 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 Midnights Children, The Satanic Verses, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, The Mimic Men, and The riddle of Arrival. In all cases these novels concentrate on the personal nature of the central characters exile. In