| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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While he does that, he says: “It was not like the almost instinctive knowledge that had come to me as a child of the plants and flowers of Trinidad; it was like learning a second language” (The Enigma of Arrival 32). The plants and flowers of his physical surroundings connect him with the social changes that he is going through.
In the novels of Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul, the notion of landscape is not simply a given, something that is natural and primal, outside and before culture. Rather, the landscapes that they paint—the bustling Trinidadian streets, the glory of Whitetown at its colonial peak, the hills outside of Jahilia where the prophet Mahound is greeted by Gabriel—are all shorthand for the cultural milieus within which these landscapes become inextricably linked to the minds of their characters. The notions of country, nation, homeland, and motherland—all the cultural edifices that both radical post-colonial theory and Marxism have attempted to demystify in recent political philosophy—are linked closely, in the minds of these novelists, with the very land on which their characters play out their lives. It is as important to the characters as their sense of self and contributes to it; there can be no conception of how the subjectivity of the characters in these novels is represented without equally understanding their connection with the national and geopolitical frameworks within which they move. In this way, a real concern of these three writers is not just the internal motion of subjectivity but also the interrelation of the subject to the world. Indeed, it is this interrelation that the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children suggests is at the very center of subjectivity:
The relation of the individual to the world is contingent on the workings of the world on that individual. The landscapes the individual travels through in large part create who that individual is and put the notion of the individual into, dispelling the certainty of full subjectivity.