Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman Rushdie, Bharati ...

The multiple selves can either be welded together—in which case the selves cannot stand as individual and separate, they are entirely caught in relationship to the individual’s other selves—creating a hybrid or a “genetic” transformation, or they can be suspended in the air, cut off from each other, taken on as circumstances dictate. This can be considered a “hyphenated” transformation. In either case, there is no suggestion that either “self,” either “role” is more real than the other is. The notion that selves can be blended or can be held in suspension seems to suggest that all selves are illusory, are roles to be played. Each self invalidates the other, and each self’s existence brings into question the stability and the place in reality of the other persona that compete for attention within the individual.

There is a definite dialectic here, but one that does not lead to the suppression of contradictions in a synthesis or sublation (as the Hegelian model would have it). Rather this dialectic, the sideways shuttling that is set in motion by the collision of the various characters’ different selves, invalidates the possibility of overcoming contradictions and creating a single self that will cohere. There is a lacuna at the center of the dialectical movement between the various roles that the exiled subject might play that means that there is no such thing as the exiled subject. The characters in these novels are multiple—like the thousands of voices that create the narrative thrust of Midnight’s Children forming a polyphonic overlay of narrative sound—without distilling any notion of an essence or essential form that an exile might take on. The exiles are different from the land in which they live (and this applies to any land—they are not fully “at home” in the country in which they were born, or any country to which they might travel). More radically, this initial difference sets in motion a series of differences that allows difference into the realm of subjectivity itself. In the system of nationality and identity, the exile holds the position that Derrida has called (variously, but meaning a similar thing) différance, the pharmakon, the supplement, the “question of the ‘yes’ ” and the trace.² In other words, exile takes the same place as the work of deconstruction itself.