| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
Their actions are not merely component parts of fictional narratives; their respective progressions are not merely a means to the end of the completion of the novels’ stories. The life stories that these novelists present are also metaphorical representations, allegorical passages of subjectivity in general, and depictions of the effects of exile on the man or woman who is cut adrift from any sense of a stable self.
That is why—and this is particularly true of Rushdie—the three novelists do not write in the realist mode and do not need the conventional tools that literary history has used to authorize depictions of the truth of the world. The realistic mode, with its emphasis on the centrality of the individual, the attempt to contain language to representations of static concepts (and, therefore, deny the free-play or imaginative flow of language), and the emphasis on a true reflection of a factual world are rejected because of their insufficiency for the task at hand. In Rushdie’s novels, the fantastical proliferates—psychics, tears that turn to diamonds, devils, and angels in bowler hats—and yet this profligacy does not in any way retard Rushdie’s claim to be representing the truth (a truth that does not kowtow to the restrictions of factuality). Likewise, in Mukherjee’s and Naipaul’s novels, the fictional is given precedence over the purely factual. Naipaul insists in The Mimic Men that “the edited version is all I have” (110).
This maneuver, the representation of the fictionality of reality, dovetails with the notion of the writing of the exile. For it is the notion of exile—the dislocation from any horizon against which to orientate a notion of the self—that augments the idea that any single and unitary notion of reality is a fictional simplification. By placing the characters into an obvious fictional narrative, the three novelists make explicit the constitutive fictions that are involved in the creation of the self. By choosing a style that relies on the free-play of language, which opens up the world to the puns, rhymes, false significations, and misinterpretations that language (necessarily by its structure) plays out, the writers are showing the discursive and linguistic components that go to construct the exile’s subjectivity.