| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
They all enact structures of freedom and play that—despite historical divergences—constitute a single, general narrative. Indeed, their fiction seems to play out this narrative in the weave of their novels’ textuality, forming out of their texts the uncertainties and lacunae that develop because of their characters’ geographical (and the resultant psychological) displacement. Their fiction imparts the questions of the subjects who are caught up in the post-colonial situation: Who is the exile? What is his or her importance? What movement does exile cause them to play out?
Who, then, is the exile? The exile lives in a foreign country, a culture that is not his or her own, one that is alien, “other.” The exile’s existence, therefore, is underpinned constantly by a sense of his or her geographical displacement. To fit in with the dominant culture, the exiles most often appropriate expectations that are alien; the exiles assimilate the roles and expectations of “the Other(s)” among whom they find themselves. In the process, the exiled displace who they are. This is iterated repeatedly in the novels of Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul. Each of these writers, in his or her own way, undermines his or her central character’s right to be just that: a character, a stable entity, a full subject. More often than not, the characters in these three authors’ novels are very much aware that they are creative products, not of the author’s fiction but of the fiction of the colonial self, the discourse on the “foreign” and the “alien.”
This is the central tenet of these writers’ fictions. They are not simply producing an artistic product in which the characters can be considered fictional representations and the plots merely narratives that are rolled out for the entertainment and aesthetic pleasure of the readership. These writers represent the real world: their novels interact with history—particularly with the history of post-coloniality—in an attempt to reach out to the truth of the world. This is why Rushdie deals with characters against the backdrop of 20th-century Indian history (Midnight’s Children ), why Mukherjee delves into the origins of the English economic colonization of India (The Holder of the World ), and why Naipaul writes of the decolonization process in a fictive version of his own Trinidad (The Mimic Men ). The characters in these novels are not merely the creations of fictions, but representations (in no matter what fractured form) of real people who are made real by their interaction with history.