| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
Similarly, in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World, the central character (a woman from early Puritan America) travels first to England and then to India and her subjectivity is broken and reconstructed by the process. She changes from the confined, puritanical spirit suited to her position in her original world into a woman who luxuriates in exoticism and sensual love. She is called throughout the novel the “Salem Bibi” (a Bibi being the Indian mistress of a white colonial), a hyphenated character, and a mirror held up to the American-Indian odyssey in which she has taken part.
Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul align the subjectivity of their central characters with the passage of their bodies through the world, demonstrating a central concern for not just the internal motion of subjectivity, but also the interrelation of the subject to the world. Not only this, but the ideas that we have seen cause the dissolution of the self—those ideas of roles, stereotypes, the process of mimicry—are all linked in the schematics of these novels with the notion of a landscape or geographical place. For example, it is notable that in Jasmine the narrator’s journey from the rural India of her childhood to the city to America and finally into the cornfields of Ohio mimics the transformations in her social roles. She changes in turn from the country girl looking for a better life into a good Indian woman, an Americanized city girl, and finally the understanding and self-effacing Midwestern wife.
Equally, in Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival , the narrator often consciously links cultural change and the acquisition of a new cultural understanding to the changing of the different landscapes through which he passes. Indeed, it seems to Naipaul’s narrator (who is a thinly veiled representation of himself) that his knowledge of how to live, the very basis of his movement through the world, is somehow mystically imbibed from the landscape. When he reaches the quiet gardens of the country house in which he finds a new home in England, he walks often on the hillsides and seems to become a new person.