國立臺灣師範大學英語學系

碩 士 論 文

Master’s Thesis

Department of English

National Taiwan Normal University

戲仿歷史中的對話論:

薩爾曼·魯西迪的《佛羅倫斯的女巫》

Dialogism in the Parodied History:

Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

指導教授: 蘇 榕

Advisor: Dr. Jung Su

研究生: 林佩汶

Pei-wen Lin

中華民國一百零六年八月

August 2017

摘要

薩爾曼·魯西迪的小說經常使用奇幻元素和歷史的強烈存在感來檢視絕對真

理的可能性。《佛羅倫斯的女巫》展現了一個對話論的世界，其世界的產生不僅

是因為事實（文藝復興時期和蒙古歷史）與虛構（東西方的相遇和矛盾的展示）

的融合，也是因為公共歷史論述與魯西迪特定化的、戲仿的歷史相互作用的結

果。

魯西迪的《佛羅倫斯的女巫》中的戲仿歷史成功地跨越了幾種不同體制的邊

界。此文本的不確定狀態不僅來自於從真實世界到超現實世界的過境，從而解決

了主觀客觀的二分法，也審視了真理的核心價值。我試圖透過巴赫汀的《對話論》，

以及杭琪恩(Linda Hutcheon)的《戲仿理論》來處理這個議題。

我的論文分為四個章節。第一章介紹小說家薩爾曼·魯西迪的生平和作品，

《午夜之子》和《佛羅倫斯的女巫》的比較以及文獻回顧。第二章著重在介紹本

論文涵蓋的理論框架: 對話論，戲仿後現代主義以及歷史。第三章：後現代的戲

仿:《佛羅倫斯的女巫》試圖透過互文性，雙聲話語以及檢視在想像與現實之間

跨界的對話論將《佛羅倫斯的女巫》分析為一部戲仿歷史。第四章是結論，我提

及戲仿的功能，以及此小說中的雙重聲調，互文性和矛盾關係並非創造出超越任

何時間和空間概念的反歷史論述。相反的，這部諧擬的文本展現了一個既強調現

在也強調歷史的多元化世界。

關鍵字: 薩爾曼·魯西迪，《佛羅倫斯的女巫》，巴赫汀，對話論，杭琪恩，《戲仿

理論》

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s novels constantly confront the possibility of absolute truth

with fantastic elements and the strong presence of history. The Enchantress of

Florence is deeply rooted in a dialogized world; a result of the merging of the factual

(the Renaissance and Mongol histories) and the fictional (the encounter between the

East and West and the display of paradoxes) and also the interaction between the

public historical discourse and Rushdie’s particularized, parodied history.

Rushdie’s parodied history in The Enchantress of Florence successfully crosses

several kinds of boundaries in different regimes. The text’s indeterminate status

results from not only the boundary-crossing from the real to the surreal worlds, thus

resolving the subjective-objective dichotomy, but it also problematizes the core value

of reality. I intend to approach the issue by Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, together

with the appropriation of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody.

My thesis is divided into four parts. Chapter one is the introduction of the thesis,

the novelist Salman Rushdie’s life and works, the comparison between Midnight’s

Children and The Enchantress of Florence and finally, the reviews of literature.

Chapter two focuses on the theoretical framework and key concepts covered in this

thesis: dialogism, parody, postmodernism and history. Chapter three intends to

rationalize The Enchantress of Florence as a parodied history through intertextuality,

double-voiced speeches and the investigation of the dialogic discourse regarding

boundary-crossing between imagination and reality. In the concluding chapter, I

mention the functions of parody. The parodic factors of the novel—double-voicedness,

intertextuality and paradoxes do not create an ahistorical discourse that seeks to

transcend any concept of time and space. On the contrary, this parodied text

exemplifies a pluralized world which emphasizes both the present and the past.

Key words: Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, Mikhail Mikhailovich

Bakhtin, dialogism, Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody

Acknowledgements

I would first like to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor, Professor Jung Su

of the department of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Professor Su’s

advice and instructions, particularly on my writing and the restructuring of chapters

and ideas, have guided me through the trek of completing this master thesis. Her

encouragement has been a tremendous support for me in the course of this academic

pilgrimage.

I am also grateful for the experts who are involved in review of my thesis:

Professor Pin-chia Feng and Professor Chun-yen Chen. Without their valuable

comments, this thesis cannot be successfully completed.

Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents, who have

supported and encouraged me continuously throughout my years of study and through

the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not

have been possible without them. Thank you.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction 1

The Enchantress of Florence 1

Rushdie, His Novels and Islam 5

Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence 7

Reviews of Literature: Secular Humanism, Intertextuality and Boundary-crossing 9

Chapter Two: Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts of The Enchantress of

Florence 15

Dialogism 15

Parody—an Effective Tool of Postmodernist Fictions 19

Parody, Dialogism and Postmodernism in The Enchantress of Florence 23

History in Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and in Postmodernist Theory 26

Chapter Three: A Postmodern Parody: The Enchantress of Florence 31

Intertextual Bouncing 32

Another’s Speech; Refracted Authorial Intentions 50

Border-crossing between Reality and Imagination 55

Chapter Four: Conclusion 62

Works Cited 68

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Chapter One

Introduction

Any mythological tale can bear a thousand and one interpretations,

because the peoples who have lived with and used the story have, over

time, poured all those meanings into it. This wealth of meaning is the

secret of the power of any myth.

—Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 48

The Enchantress of Florence

My journey into Rushdie’s oeuvre begins with his well-known fiction—

Midnight’s Children, whose title suggests the historical and political transitions of

India and the imposed historicity on the characters. The following publications,

Shame and The Satanic Verses, are both highly regarded by literary critics for their

critiques on the contemporary politics and religion. One could say that these heavily

lauded predecessors left a lasting impression which ostensibly reminds the reader of

the stark contrast to the iceberg effect The Enchantress of Florence conveys, unless

the reader digs deeper beyond the mystery to discover the latter’s true and inner

workings. In my view, however, The Enchantress of Florence appeals to critics not for

its utopian-like narration, but for the multiplicity presented by its intentions and

structure. In fact, the harsh criticisms against The Enchantress of Florence ironically

targets what this novel critiques—the literal interpretation of any representations. This

critique on commonly accepted truth we believe in embodies the postmodern

attitude—suspicion and the postmodern concern for the idea of closure (Bertens 145).

In this light, I will approach The Enchantress of Florence from the postmodern

perspective in my thesis.

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The Enchantress of Florence disappoints those who look for a single purpose.

Yet, The Enchantress of Florence is not a historical romance. In contrast with a

historical romance’s single purpose to entertain, The Enchantress of Florence keeps

the audience in a state of suspension—between doubt and belief, between powers

(humanism and an absolute monarch,) and between art and its creators. Moreover, The

Enchantress of Florence does not meet the standard of historical novels because it

lacks comprehensive historical details and elements of magic, nor should this novel be

labeled as a political satire, because it contains more than dissents and political

criticism. I contend that The Enchantress of Florence is a parody of history, because

by imitating historical Mughal Empire and Florence, it problematizes representations

of history. In this way, it further questions the representations of truth. This coincides

with the spirit of parody. Parody draws on another context or discourse, be it historical

facts or fictions. In fact, parody is more intimate with history than we have assumed.

According to Mahdi Teimouri, parody “problematizes history and the history of

representation” (4). Therefore, parody is also “historiographic metafiction,” in

Hutcheon’s perspective (qtd, in Teimouri 4). This intimacy of parody and history is

demonstrated in The Enchantress of Florence. This close relationship ultimately

dissolves the dichotomous relations such as the disciplines—history and literature, the

objective and subjective, and the objects and their metaphors.

The Enchantress of Florence begins and ends with fictional characters: a

golden-haired mysterious traveler: Mogor dell'Amore, who possesses many

names—Agostino Vespucci and Niccolò Vespucci, arrives in Fatehpur Sikri with

nothing but a tale; Qara Köz, or Angelica, or Lady Black Eyes, the hidden princess

and also later, the enchantress of Florence. Yet, what follows this fictitious story is an

ambitiously displayed long list of Rushdie’s bibliography, seeming to ensure a place

for history in a story dominated by imagination.

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In the form of parody, Rushdie’s historical narration does not present a

straightforward duplication of the history itself. Any literal understanding of the text

fails to discern its resemblance of reality from the reality it seeks to problematize. The

historical reality in The Enchantress of Florence is mediated by the fictiveness of the

text that suspends one’s belief. The mediated reading becomes transformative with

the present, always complicating itself in the paradoxical mechanism of parody, the

self-reflexive consciousness of the metafiction, and finally the dialogic construction

of a historical narrative.

Firstly, parody’s paradoxical nature constitutes The Enchantress of Florence with

the concept of historiography that draws its focus on the complex nature of historical

representation. The exhibition of the improbable East-West encounter invites the

reader to explore the human experience of forging history of any kind or at the very

least its possibility. Other than merely celebrating cultural hybridity, Rushdie attempts

to provide new forms of agency in which the reader is able to participate and interrupt

freely: “Flirting, mixing things up, Rushdie imagines new opportunities for agency

and intimacy within the imposed conditions of cultural encounter” (Walkowitz 133).

Rushdie’s edited versions of truth demonstrate narrativism of history—“telling a

story (or writing a history) is a construction we impose on the facts” (F. R. Ankersmit

6). Contrary to what it seems, this rewriting of history does not reject the possibility

of truth but reveals the ambivalence of historical writing: that figurative language

inescapably permeates solid truth.

Additionally, Rushdie brings two contrasting worlds together in marriage in this

novel—the imaginative and the real. I will discuss how Rushdie disintegrates this

dichotomy between the fictive and the factual by aiming attention firstly at Rushdie’s

juxtaposition of the prevailing acceptance of mysticism and dominant ideology of

religion, and then at the relationship of imagination and reality.

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Both forms of imagination—magic and religion— were dominant in the

sixteenth century of Florence and Mughal Empire. Yet, the narrator opts for magic for

its humanistic, personal and timely values, while dismissing religion for its intention

to be the metanarrative, dominant force that limits imagination. Although both magic

and religion are considered to be forms of imaginations, religion’s impersonal tone

alerts Akbar: “Was faith no more than an error or our ancestors?” (Rushdie 87) When

one holds fast to religion for the sake of family habit, it means faith is just “eternal

handing down,” an inheritance that one accepts unconditionally (Rushdie 87).

Expanding the thesis of reality, Rushdie takes up the two ostensibly bifurcating

concepts—imaginative works and reality. In The Enchantress of Florence, works of

imagination and reality are on the same level of accessibility. The painter Dashwanth

enters into his Pygmalion dream; his creation, the painting Qara-Köz-Nama

eventually “uncreates” him. This transgression of reality becomes apparent as Akbar

believes the border can be crossed in another direction: “A dreamer could become his

dream,” just as he himself crosses said direction; it delimits the reality by forging

Jodha into existence out of his fantasy (Rushdie 135). Not only is creation a form of

life, life is a form of creation. Creators “conjure beautiful somethings from empty

nothings,” so life can be realized with imagination: Mogor dell-Amore, “a creature of

fables,” brings his life to existence with mere storytelling (Rushdie 49, 50, 220). Sikri

is another invention of Akbar’s, a “beautiful lie,” for he materializes his wish of a

world “beyond religion, region, rank, and tribe” with the help of enough accomplices

(Rushdie 45). The metaphorical content of imagination lies at the core of this novel,

reflecting the world we live in; ideas that unite groups of people, such as nation-states

and religions, are essentially mere imaginations. In other words, the world is a tale,

and a tale is the world.

In a detailed analysis of The Enchantress of Florence in Chapter three, I will

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demonstrate how The Enchantress of Florence embodies other parodic elements—the

double-voicedness of characters’ interpenetrating speeches and the interruptions of

Rushdie’s authorial voice, the self-awareness that renders this novel metafictional

nature, and finally dialogism that discloses the mutual reliance of opposing subjects,

such as the self and the other.

Ultimately, I contend that the parodied history in The Enchantress of Florence

illustrates a transforming totality—the ostensible sameness of human and history that

repeats itself are in fact embodiments of “discord, difference, disobedience” (Rushdie

339). This totality presents itself as the genealogical view of history; the history that is

neither stable nor objective, but a politicized interpretation. In turn, this genealogical

history reveals the attempt at truth, not the credibility of truth. One clear marker of the

before mentioned attempt is its reflexivity; it is aware of its own emphasis on

representations and performativity. In the end, the history of The Enchantress of

Florence enacts the concept of absolute indeterminacy.

Rushdie, His Novels and Islam

Before further discussing The Enchantress of Florence, I would like to briefly

sketch Rushdie’s early career and his previous works. Rushdie’s debut novel Grimus

inaugurated Rushdie’s writing career with a rather low sale, but his second novel,

Midnight’s Children became a huge success. Midnight’s Children won the Booker

Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Arts Council Writers’ Award and the

English-Speaking Union Award. After this much acclaimed novel, Rushdie published

another two well-acknowledged novels: Shame and then The Satanic Verses. While

Midnight’s Children tells a national allegory, an alternative history and magic realism,

Shame touches upon contemporary political figures and creates dispute over its

mocked and satirized politics. The more recent novels of Rushdie’s, besides his

non-fictions, are The Enchantress of Florence, published in 2008, and the novel

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published in 2010— Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to his children’s book Haroun

and the Sea of Stories. The Satanic Verses, the cornerstone of his works, was highly

praised by critics, winning the 1988 Whitebread prize (Pipes 42). Yet, the

“blasphemous” depiction of Islamism in The Satanic Verses greatly offends the

Muslim circle. What follows is the most widely-known incident of this author's

life—the fatwa. The Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini issues the infamous

fatwa against Rushdie.

Born in Bombay, educated in England, and now living in New York, Rushdie

grew up in a secular Muslim family. Several recurrent themes in Rushdie’s novels

have a strong connection to his life experience, among which disbelief and migration

participate in the construction of The Enchantress of Florence. Rushdie’s personal

experience of dislocation prepares him distinct perspectives from being both an

outsider and insider of cultures. Yet, I will purposely focus on Rushdie’s personal

experience with religion in this discussion of Rushdie’s life and works, for the

depiction of the dominant humanist ethos in The Enchantress of Florence constantly

addresses the problem of faith.

Tracing back his family line, Rushdie’s secularized ideal towards Islamism

derives from his family tradition. According to Rushdie, his devout Muslim

grandfather has been lenient to religion. It is also likely that Kashmiri Islam, to which

his grandfather belongs, is indeed the more secularized and more peaceful in

comparison to other branches. Moreover, to Rushdie, “Kashmiri Islam was – until the

1960s – a model of pluralist tolerance” (“Salman Rushdie: His life, His Work and His

Religion” 2006).

A simple observation of Islamic society reveals how religious texts are capable

of establishing an entire community’s ideology by means of discursive establishments.

For this, it is understandable that the Muslims take offense at The Satanic Verses. In

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an interview with Jeremy Isaacs, Rushdie explains that The Satanic Verses is a novel

that frequently problematizes the origin of the religion. Rushdie’s exploration of belief

and faith touches upon the psycho-sensitive areas, in Sara Maitland’s term, the

inviolability of the sacred text, and therefore can pose itself as a threat to the Muslims.

Consequently, Rushdie’s parodic use of the religious text in The Satanic Verses proves

the powerful influence written words have on the material world.

Yet, people taking sympathy on Rushdie such as Daniel Pipes agree that only

“unsophisticated readers” will see the novel as blasphemy; likewise, Rushdie himself

considers those irritated Muslims have no sense of humor (53). Although Rushdie

recognizes Muslims’ anger, he disagrees with accusing him of corrupting Islamism:

“The real purpose of fiction is not to distort facts but to explore human nature, to

explore ideas on which the human race rests itself” (Chauhan 99). In other words,

discourses such as history and religion can become stages on which the author and

reader explore human nature with various personae.

Judging from this episode of Rushdie’s life, one cannot say that the art is purely

out of the reach of the political or religions. In fact, in Rushdie’s writing, nothing

stays pure; reality is permeated with imaginations and reversely the imaginary is

invaded by the reality. The medley of all views of reality and the struggle between the

aesthetic and the ideological likewise centralizes the discourse in Rushdie’s newest

novel: The Enchantress of Florence.

Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence

One of Rushdie’s most outstanding novels: Midnight’s Children shares with The

Enchantress of Florence similar features that Rushdie is most known of. Both novels

present historical accounts with magic realism and both novels are fundamentally

rewritten history with doubled narrative. According to Enrique Galván Á lvarez,

Midnight’s Children also uses its characters to perform history : “History is, therefore,

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fully and doubly narrativised, conveyed not only in the shape of a novel, but also

revealed in the narratives of those who, in one way or another, participate in and

embody it” (Álvarez, “Children’s Voices at Midnight” 118). Midnight’s Children and

The Enchantress of Florence thus bear resemblances to each other in the way they

treat history with fantasy and personalized accounts.

Yet, Midnight’s Children and The Enchantress of Florence differ in the way

hybridity is represented. Midnight’s Children is about the chaotic postcolonial era of

hybridity whereas The Enchantress of Florence’s history is configured in the

harmonious ambience. Thiara observes this difference between Bombay and the

Mughal Empire, quoting Rushdie’s statement about Bombay: ‘Bombay, most

cosmopolitan, most hybrid, most hotchpotch of Indian cities’” (qtd in Thiara 416). In

Thiara’s observation, The Enchantress of Florence embodies differences within one

unified synthesis: “Mughal synthesis is a more considered and planned experiment, an

élite endeavour, rather than the chaotic and vibrant hybridity of Bombay’s streets”

(Thiara 416).

Moreover, Midnight’s Children is essentially a novel through which Rushdie

attempts to figure out his own history while The Enchantress of Florence is the story

of the power of story-telling. Like Salim Sinai, the protagonist in Midnight’s Children

is handcuffed to history, serving as a metaphoric existence to history, the main

characters in The Enchantress of Florence function as parts of the buildup for a

liberating experience for a writer. Rushdie states in the interview posted by Random

House of Canada: “The world of dreams and the world of material, reality were

seemed as the same thing, and to write about that kind of world is a wonderful

liberation” (“Salman Rushdie, author of The Enchantress of Florence”). Departing

from the grim reality that Midnight’s Children deals with, The Enchantress of

Florence embarks on a journey of playing with history and the idea of reality. If

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Midnight’s Children depicts a world of conflicts in harmony, then The Enchantress of

Florence finds harmony in contradictions.

The approaches adopted in this thesis: Hutcheon’s theory of parody and

Bakhtin’s dialogism provide space for the idea of liberation in The Enchantress of

Florence. Parody’s ability to come to terms with the past, as Hutcheon points out, and

dialogism’s acknowledgment of adversity in unity are essential elements in The

Enchantress of Florence. The Enchantress of Florence constantly juxtaposes the

grandiose official history with personal accounts, and it presents doubly-coded

narratives in frame stories. Ultimately, regarding the issue of origin, both Midnight’s

Children and The Enchantress of Florence embody characters of mistaken origins, yet

The Enchantress of Florence focuses on the creative narratives brought by mistaken

origin instead of questioning the idea of origin.

Reviews of Literature: Secular Humanism, Intertextuality and

Boundary-crossing

The reviews of The Enchantress of Florence in this chapter cover a wide range of

issues including cultural pluralism, feminism, secular humanism, intertextuality,

boundary-crossing, and potential-relationality. Judging by its multiple themes, The

Enchantress of Florence is itself a text of plural forms. I will select two themes to

discuss in my literature review: intertextuality and border-crossing. Meanwhile,

Rushdie’s interviews on The Enchantress of Florence reveal the author’s own

exposition of the novel and thus reinforces the understanding of the story.

The Enchantress of Florence depicts two worlds of liberalist characteristics: the

Florence in the Renaissance age and the Mughal Empire under Akbar the religious

tolerant emperor’s rule. The concept of secularism arises not only from the

representation of the two powerful regimes but also from “the retreat of religion from

public life paired with the decline of individual belief.” The accounts of humanism are

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mainly exemplified in “a commitment to beauty as the ultimate aesthetic value” in

The Enchantress of Florence (Neuman 678).

A couple of critics list out the literary works that The Enchantress of Florence

alludes to. Christopher Rollason points out that the princess Qara Köz parallels to

Sierva Mara in Of love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez and Blimunda

in Memorial do Convento by José Saramago. The traveler Mogor dell-Amore and the

emperor Akbar remind the reader of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities.

Radhouan Ben Amara also discovers the Indo-Persian storytelling tradition in The

Enchantress of Florence. B.J. Geetha is another of the many critics who draw on

intertextuality in this novel. Geetha provides the theoretical framework of

intertextuality by listing its genealogy, in which Geetha draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin's

dialogism that emphasizes how the author, the reader and the text interact and

interrelate. Although to some readers and critics intertextuality is the center of

discussion, Rushdie suggests a casual attitude toward piled up allusions and historical

facts.

Certainly literary allusions in The Enchantress of Florence are one of the

definitive characteristics, but Rushdie holds an open attitude toward the allusions and

historical truths placed in the text. This can be juxtaposed with Rollason’s criticism of

Rushdie’s immoderate writing and rewriting of history in The Enchantress of

Florence, and his writing of a “medieval chronicle” (Rollason 2). Rushdie thinks that

the reader is not required to have the exact amount of knowledge of allusions to read

such a book (“Authors@ Google”). The making of the world will take its course once

the reader starts turning pages. What the world in the novel means to the reader, says

Rushdie, is the point from which the reader departs and takes on the journey of

questioning. It is Rushdie’s attempt to arouse curiosity instead of lecturing his

knowledge of history (“Authors@ Google”).

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Yet, intertextuality conveys an intrinsic feature of Rushdie’s novels, that is,

double-voicedness. The historical discourse in The Enchantress of Florence is not

merely the background of the story. History is coded with the novelistic imagination.

The novel is interactive inside the very text and between the reader and author.

Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism comes into play when the novel flirts with historical

truth and when the reader participates in the construction of the narrative.

Next, border-crossing— both geographically and ideologically—is also a major

attribute to The Enchantress of Florence. The act of border-crossing takes place in

The Enchantress of Florence when the characters cross geographical borders and

when artists and their creations break the walls of reality. The theme of

border-crossing is mainly brought up by Amara, who discusses the idea of the liminal

zone between borders. In this liminal space, transformations are made possible.

Meanwhile, Neuman also touches on the similar aspect of border-crossing in this

novel by his emphasis on the role of novelistic imagination.

Border-crossing in both geographical and ideological forms helps to establish the

hybrid structure. Furthermore, this movement across boundaries challenges the

frontier of reality. Amara examines both the status and the result of border-crossing

actions. Borders generally refer to spatial boundaries, but they also signify

constructed lines in social, cultural and political spheres. The Enchantress of Florence

exhibits two kinds of border-crossing: the geographical border-crossing which is

presented through several characters’ constant journeying across lands and oceans,

and the paradigmatic border-crossing which occurs when beliefs are strengthened to

the extent where they become reality.

Amara offers detailed discussions about the ideas of frontiers and space,

contending that frontier is the place of contact of self and other, and that frontier is

always moving away from our reaches: “boundaries, edges, frontiers, thresholds, like

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horizons, are forever in translation, always receding from our efforts to transgress

them” (3). As the point of contact, the frontier recedes as soon as we reach it. Amara

then discusses The Enchantress of Florence, noting its theme of “exile, displacement,

nomadism, border-crossing, and the dense web of connection binding East and West”

(12). In Amara’s discussion on exile, she brings up the interplay of the two concepts:

normalization and excess. Using the immigrant writer Vladimir Nobokov as an

example, Amara implies that humans or more specifically, writers, are essentially

rootless and therefore their nationality should not be of utmost importance in terms of

their writers’ identities, as Nobokov says: “The writer's art is his real passport” (qtd.

in Amara 6).

When migrant writers write, according to Rushdie, they need to find ways to

re-appropriate themselves because they are without context:

And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots,

language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of

the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all

three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being

human. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 278)

In this sense, narration is a process of self-forming. For immigrant writers, the

shaping of identity cannot be fully completed without self-appropriation, and

therefore, without imagination. Rushdie thinks that as the metropolitan culture

increases, we are all becoming migrants because we are all constantly crossing

borders: “Migrants— borne-across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very

essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross

frontiers; in that sense, we are all I migrant peoples” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

278-279). In the contemporary world, crossing geographical borders with the help of

technology takes place daily. Migration becomes a metaphor because it reflects our

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conditions in the virtual world. Rushdie points out the idea of migration being

metaphor for the contemporary society, and that immigrant writers like him need to

negotiate their own identity through the act of imagining.

Similarly, Neuman notes one key element of secularization is the novelistic

imagination. Stories and their creators are the dominating forces in this fictional

world:

In Rushdie’s work, fiction and narrative are powerful, transformative forces;

narrative is less a means of representing the world than a mode of apprehension,

a metaphysical hammer he uses to smash certainties of causality, a forge of the

alternate real. (Neuman 680)

This leads back to Neuman’s point of secularization in The Enchantress of Florence.

Literature assumes the role of god when literary works replace the divine texts.

Beliefs are men’s imagination, and they prove to be mutually accessible. In our act of

apprehending the world, we are also shaping the world at the same time.

The frontiers in The Enchantress of Florence are not just political demarcations;

frontiers also exist in the process of identity construction and in novelistic imagination.

For the theme of border-crossing, Amara observes the incessant movement and the

ensuing displacement and identity negotiation. Neuman notices this strong urge of

Rushdie’s to place emphasis on the power of narrative and fiction.

Hong-ling Guo, on the other hand, notices a different kind of relation in The

Enchantress of Florence, that is, similarities. Guo critiques the policy of

cosmopolitanism that specifies difference and argues that it is resemblance that

Rushdie draws on in The Enchantress of Florence. Finally, via resemblance, the novel

creates an all-inclusive world of totality. As a whole, Guo advocates a planetary view

that surpasses cosmopolitanism, which is limited by its nationalist principal, and

which ultimately goes beyond human. Guo believes that the message of the planetary

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approach to The Enchantress of Florence is that mankind should recognize

themselves as finite beings, but we are granted infinite possibilities by our

imaginations.

The above-mentioned analyses, although each present different approaches to

The Enchantress of Florence, reveal two major aspects of the novel—its relation to

other literary works and the theme of border-crossing. These two concepts will further

establish dialogism’s proposition, which is to reveal double-voicedness and the

novelistic perception of reality.

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Chapter Two

Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts of The

Enchantress of Florence

[W]e must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory

and multi-languaged world.

-- Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

Dialogism

In order to better explicate my dialogic approach in this thesis, a few

perspectives from critics of Bakhin’s dialogism are taken into account. Because

dialogism’s linguistic model focuses on the dualistic nature of speech, the dialogic

idea of hybridization becomes the fundamental in the dialogic model. However,

dialogism does not simply propose equality in the dualistic mode; it contains internal

stratifications that prove to be hierarchical and performs the concept of the

hybridization while embodying the authoritative voice. In fact, the political features

actually consolidate Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dialogism consists of multiplicity expressed

in a political fashion.

Focusing on Bakhtin’s 1941 critical essay “Discourse in the Novel,” I explore his

accounts of the structure of language and the novelistic style that demonstrates the

dialogic and parodic. A dialogic novel, according to Bakhtin, incorporates

heterolgossia, which is “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express

authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (324). Two different intentions are

expressed in one utterance, which reveals the reprocessed authorial intention.

According to the hybrid model, the multi-voiced world is a place in which the

consciousness relies on otherness and every center is a decentered center; that is, a

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relative rather than absolute state of being—a world that parody complies with. If we

apply Bakhtin’s dialogic discourse to the reading of the enchanted past in Rushdie’s

novel, the East-West encounter may be reckoned as a mobilized, open text. The

dialogic discourse enlivens a historic text because it draws on the presence of

relations: every wholeness is a part of the relation to another unit.

Since dialogism “is built into the very structure of language itself,” the

distinction between dialogue and dialogism is also worth noting (Hirschkop 104).

Ken Hirschkop points out that to have a dialogue, one must engage in actions such as

compromise, negotiation and “ideological give and take” (103). Meanwhile,

dialogism, being the result of a novelist’s project, does not have real dialogues “but an

interesting kind of complexity” (Hirschkop 107). Dialogism’s task is to “cite and

represent” the primary texts’ language but not respond on equal terms (Hirschkop

108). In other words, dialogism does not work on an even “ideological give and take”

model. Although dialogism brings to the surface the voices of the people, and

seemingly advocates populism, dialogism does not necessary consist of equality that

real dialogues do. Hirschkop says: “[dialogism] is valued not for the equal rights

embodied within it, but for its quasi-Nietzschean ‘liveliness,’ its earthiness and

vulgarity, its imbrication with interests and struggles” (108). Consequently, dialogism

takes its form from dialogue, but it contains no such evenness one requires for real

dialogue.

The crux of dialogism is double-voicedness. “Double-voiced discourse is always

internally dialogized,” and examples for this dialogic discourse would be “comic,

ironic or parodic discourse” (Bakhtin 324). In these texts, the narrator refracts the

discourse through characters’ voices.

Applying dialogism in the anthropological realm, Vincent Crapanzano points out

the parodic nature of cross-cultural communications. Not only does the second

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speaker inevitably re-contextualize the first speaker’s utterances (stereotypically,) but

the utterances also coexist in an antithetical and thus hierarchical relationship

(Crapanzano 437). This reveals not only the linguistic nature of dialogism but its

political aspect. Correspondingly, parody “must evoke or indicate another utterance; it

must be antithetical in some respect to that utterance; and it must have a clearly higher

semantic authority than that utterance (Crapanzano 437). Their relationship exists as a

form of competition; each voice always seeks to be the dominant one.

Meanwhile, Hirschkop draws on parody to exemplify the working of

double-voicedness; he says that parody appears to “combine the intentions or

semantic position typical of a speech form with a second accent added, so to speak, by

the author, who orchestrates the target language in line with his or her own aesthetic

purposes” (104). Namely, the novelist purposely re-accentuates the primary source to

achieve an aesthetic goal. Similarly, Sofya Khagi asserts that most postmodern

parodies carry with them heteroglot languages, and they expose each other’s

multiplicitous presence via coexistence (586). These examples of dialogism—

cultural-exchange and parody—shows us that the dialogic novel is not a static,

enclosed text whose discourse is well-kept and unchanged; instead, this parodic

discourse expresses itself as an open text that invites contemporary voices to

complicate its structure, its intentions and its problems.

The fact that the efficacy of dialogism is based upon the concept of otherness

reveals its link to Einstein’s relativism in the nineteenth century. Dialogism develops

in a paradigmatic shift from the Newtonian idea of the world. Seeing dialogism as a

version of relativism, Michael Holquist argues that within the concept of dialogism,

“the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness”. Language, to which

dialogism owes its debt, is built upon otherness as well: “Language becomes ‘a

language’ when perceived alongside another language, and it is the relationship of the

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text’s heterogeneous components to one another that compromises the components

[…]” (Kahgi 586). In other words, otherness helps to reveal and thus defines one’s

consciousness. The participatory act in dialogism further denotes the idea that

consciousness relies on the relation between the center and that which is not the center.

Once again, in the dialogic realm, the center and the non-center are both shifting,

rather than absolute ideas.

Since the dialogic relations also entail “differences that cannot be overcome”, the

self and other relation cannot be eradicated. Holquist enumerates other dualistic

relations similar to the self-and-other unit, such as the signifier and the signified, the

text and the context, and the system and history (Holquist 19). These above-stated

subjects cannot sustain their existence without their correspondent parts. In like

manner, Peter John Massyn points out this interdependency in dialogism, and

perceives dialogism as potentially political:

In these later manifestations, dialogism, whether in the guise of novelistic

discourse or carnival culture, is thus clearly in the service of a political project. It is

dialectically bound to its opposite: dialogism as a subversive tactic is determined by

its opposition to a dominant monological discourse. (138)

Moreover, according to Bakhtin, double-voicedness is vitalized not so much by

individual contradictions as by a “social-linguistic speech diversity and

multi-languagedness” (326). Dialogism is deeply rooted in the social and political

ground and it embodies power-relations in which dialectical opposites coexist and are

codependent. In other words, this political mechanism entitled dialogism cannot stay

in stasis, and it will always remain a party of at least two members. Dialogism’s

nature is inherently self-conflicting as it’s always an inclusion of two or more internal

forces.

Finally, there exists a noticeable connection between dialogism and the rhetoric

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of parody. Given its paradoxical nature, dialogism sometimes expresses itself in the

form of parody. Much like how Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination is composed in a

parodic style— praising the multivocality in the novelistic discourse while embodying

this hegemonic power that excludes the poetic genre, dialogism, sometimes takes the

form of the carnival, possesses both the transgressive and hierarchical phenomena.

Articulating in the form of parody, dialogism embodies the authoritative character and

at the same time retains its subversive potential (Massyn 141). This also reveals how

dialogism is a form of representation.

Dialogism, therefore, does not simply present a direct, first-hand discourse.

According to Hirschkop and Crapanzano, the second participant or discursive part in

the dialogic relationship always re-contextualizes and re-accentuates the first

participant’s speech or the primary discourse. Other characteristics of dialogism:

double-voicedness, hierarchical power structure, and finally, its tendency to perform

bent intentions parallel to the structure of parody. They all appear as homogenous

groups, but within these singular units there exists the multiplicity that continuously

transform.

Parody—an Effective Tool of Postmodernist Fictions

Parody is most commonly applied as an effective tool in both postmodern and

postcolonial fictions. Teimouri compares Fredric Jameson and Hutcheon's critiques of

parody. According to Teimouri, Jameson holds a rather negative view towards parody,

preferring the term pastiche instead of parody. The parodic practices, in Jameson's

opinion, lack depth and history, which is also a fitting description for late capitalism.

On the other hand, Hutcheon credits parody’s political efficacy. Parody exercises its

political agenda through ironizing, which allows parody a historical continuation and

also peculiarity (Teimouri 4). Hutcheon’s view of parody is “broad” and “liberal,”

according to Brian Edwards, as Hutcheon liberates parody from the mere intent to

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ridicule and emphasizes parody’s paradoxical nature to both imitate and subvert

(66-68). My thesis will adopt Hutcheon’s point of view on parody—parody’s

reworking of another text embodies both deconstructing and reconstructing. While the

contemporary view of parody oftentimes limits the scope to parody’s comic effect,

Hutcheon’s theory of parody incorporates both parody’s aesthetic (irony) and political

(resistance within authorial control) functions. In brief, what characterizes parody is

its paradox and ambivalence, and its ability to revise and construct at the same time.

According to G. D. Kiremidjian, the fundamental principles of parody are

expressed in three ways: firstly, it upsets the balance between its form and content;

secondly, it questions the relationship between its form and content; lastly, it imitates

art to expose "something about its basic character" (233). It is the last point from

which parody works the most effectively, and that is when parody exercises its most

vitriolic critiques.

The metafictional feature of parody marks it a distinctively different form of

criticism. Traditionally, parody disqualifies as art. Aristotle’s definition of art says the

very function of art is to imitate life or mirror the nature (Kiremidjian 233). Unlike the

kind of art Aristotle appreciates, parody mirrors itself and imitates another work of art.

In other words, parody turns the original work into an “introverted and introspective”

state. This double intention or paradox: to criticize and to represent are the key

features of parody. Simon Dentith in his book Parody also highlights this aspect of

parody: "parody involves the imitation and transformation of another’s words"

(Dentith 3). In addition, William Van O’connor also regards parody as criticism: “One

of the functions of parody is to make us see, or better, let us experience, the nature of

a style and subject, and their excesses” (241). From this point, parodied texts have an

ambivalent relationship with their target texts; parodies reenact, and thus participate in

the guilt of the texts they criticize.

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Ann Jefferson, in her review of Margaret A. Rose’s Parody//Meta-Fiction says

that the “object of criticism” becomes an integral part of the parody (232). Moreover,

the criticism itself is ambivalent, for that parody does not always bear negative

critiques against the target text. Similarly, Hutcheon thinks that the postmodernist

critique is strange because it is in complicity with power and domination (4). Parody

is the form of paradox that the postmodern discourse applies: "by both using and

ironically abusing general conventions and specific forms of representation,

postmodern art works to de-naturalize them" (Hutcheon, The Politics of

Postmodernism 8).

Parody, as opposed to the traditional definition as merely a rhetorical device, also

functions on a political level. In the analysis of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Geneva

Cobb Moore avers that Morison adopts this “ancient genre”— the use of parody to

reconstruct and deconstruct the history of America. In her account of A Mercy as a

demonic parody, Moore addresses several functions of parody: it reduces the

authoritative power of the mainstream discourse, debunks the hypocrisy of the target

text and thus deconstructs it, and it also problematizes the assumed authoritative

boundaries (2).

The dialogic relations lie in the crux of parody; dialogic relations do not entail

egalitarian relations, but the hierarchical, mobile and contradictory intersubjectivity.

According to Bakhtin, the aesthetic and political values of the novel are expressed

through the dialogic relations, foregrounded by heteroglossia. In turn, heteroglossia

becomes effective when it is situated in a dialogized context. In this case, parody

dialogizes the heteroglot language, and contemporizes the past that was once fixated.

Moreover, parody is capable of bringing the high of history to the low of the present

(Bakhtin 21). Parody and dialogue’s “life spark” is ineluctably kindled by the social

situation of the contemporary (Singer 176). That being the case, parody, dialogism

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and heteroglossia perform with political intentions—they work with and against their

enemies and they find unofficial moments of liberation within the legalized zone.

Dialogism has a linguistic shape that suggests the emphasis on the stylistic, but

dialogism takes on a social feature of language, that is, language as an “ideologically

saturated” perspective that allows the “maximum of mutual understanding in all

spheres of ideological life” (Bakhtin 271). For this reason, dialogism is capable of

representing the dialogized discourse which real dialogue cannot attend to. Although

appealing to the concept of hybridization, dialogism does not embody simple equality;

dialogism performs a multiplicitous world with its internally hierarchical stratum.

Dialogic languages are also parodic designs for they express heteroglossia with an

authoritative tone.

The dialogic novel and the dialogue differ in dialogism’s representational acts

and its intramural unevenness in contrast with dialogue’s premise of equal exchanges

of the ideological. Although the dialogic discourse brings the voice of the people to

the forefront, it highlights not the evenness of the people and those in power, but the

“quazi-Nietzschean ‘liveliness,’ its earthiness and vulgarity […]” (Hirschkop 108).

The key element of dialogism is double-voicedness, or “internally dialogized

discourse” (Bakhtin 325). In a dialogized text, the characters speak with an already

processed authorial voice. Double-voicedness can be applied to a modern

phenomenon— cross-cultural communications. The second speaker in cross-cultural

communications always refracts the original ideas from the first speaker, while both

kinds of utterances remain in a competitive and hierarchical relationship (Crapanzano

437). Parody, in the case of double-voicedness, best exemplifies the working of

dialogism. The author remodels the original voice with his or her own intention, and

thus creates a voice of two accents. Parody, moreover, embodies heteroglot voices

that mutually make each other’s existence seen. This feature shows that to be

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conscious of one’s existence, the other is indispensable. Language possesses this

feature as well, for it is perceived as language when the other language is present.

Dialogism also consists of the following traits: interdependency, difference, and

paradox. These two voices in the dialogic language convey interdependency and also

the idea that difference is insurmountable. Moreover, the mechanism of dialogism is

inherently paradoxical, because dialogism embraces what it critiques—it is both

subversive and authoritative. Dialogism is an authoritative voice critiquing another

authoritative intention. Finally, because of its contradicting nature, one cannot neglect

the performativity of dialogism. Dialogism’s double-voiced and hierarchical

disposition makes it a performative discourse that is oftentimes enacted through

parody.

Parody, Dialogism and Postmodernism in The Enchantress of

Florence

Being situated on the boundary between form and content— fiction and facts, the

story of The Enchantress of Florence plays with those dichotomous ideals in the form

of parody. Parody corresponds to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism because this

literary device includes multi-voicedness and act of hybridization. According to

Phiddian, “[a] complex parody can involve not just a particular aesthetic object, but

many kinds of discourse within its own structure” (683). The Enchantress of

Florence is therefore a postmodern parody, for this novel transgresses the authority

within the authoritative discourse (history) and it presents an incomplete space that

gives access to the contemporary intentions. In The Enchantress of Florence, the story

presents the dialogic relations by form—incorporated genres, and by including

multiple voices—concealing another’s speech in the present speech. What is more,

this novel conveys the dialogic space between two opposing sides—the space

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between fiction and fact, between authority and subversion and between creator and

creation.

The parodic form, dialogic value and postmodernist concept enter the story

of The Enchantress of Florence also in a dialogic relation. The dialogic discourse

carried out by parody inevitably resonates within the postmodernist realm. The

complexity of parody lies in its juggling of different intentions, or discourses—“A

complex parody can involve not just a particular aesthetic object, but many kinds of

discourse within its own structure” (Phiddian 683). Robert Phiddian points out that

the essence of parody is the relations between those incorporated texts: “[the meaning

of parody] is a matter of relation and constant cross-reference between the parody and

its model” (684). Correspondingly, postmodernism operates in the form of parody:

“[p]ostmodern discourse […] not only entangles primary level discourse with

secondary or meta-level discourse but it also confounds description with prescription”

(Crapanzano 435). The first part of Crapanzaon’s description of postmodernism

conveys postmodernism’s tendency to incorporate other discourses while the second

half shows its confusing nature: one cannot reject nor accept postmodernist

prescription to reality (435). Approaching The Enchantress of Florence through the

lens of postmodernism makes apparent the various forms of interactions, allowing all

aspects to mingle all at once without resorting to a single meta-narrative.

As Hutcheon points out, to stress on the worldly nature of parody, one needs to

redefine parody and delimit parody from the conventional conception. Parody is

traditionally perceived as a kind of mockery, an act to ridicule. As parody’s

etymological origin informs us, parody’s prefix “para” in Latin means both “counter”

and “against,” and “odos” means song (Hutcheon 32). Parody is thus generally

considered to be a form of imitation intended to tease or insult. However, Hutcheon

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finds a more neutral definition of parody from Samuel Johnson and Susan Stewart

which states that parody means changing the original idea for the new purpose or

replacing the original elements with the new ones to have “an inverse or incongruous

relation to the borrowed text” (qtd. in Hutcheon 36). Conclusively, Hutcheon defines

parody as repetition with difference, and “imitation with critical ironic distance”

(37).

Yet, parody can be confused with quotation, pastiche or satire. Unlike quotation

or citation that is “a matter of nostalgic imitation of past models” and borrows the

authority of the primary text or speech to suit their needs, parody confronts formality,

recodes and “establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon 8). Judging

by their forms, quotation and parody share similar aspects such as their invitation of

the authoritative voices, but parody departs from quotation by its tendency to alter the

original meaning, in the disguise of mere imitation. Likewise, pastiche seeks to

imitate but parody attempts to transform. In this case, parody is more flexible with

adaptations whereas pastiche needs to stay in the same genre as its model (Hutcheon

38). According to Hutcheon, parody differs from satire because parody is intramural

while satire is extramural—“social, moral” (44). On top of that, parodied texts are not

always negative as satirized texts. Yet, parody can be extramural and therefore satiric;

satire, on the other hand, is not necessary parodic.

All in all, parody is both historical and social. Parody is the synthesis of the past

and present texts as well as value judgments, both “a personal act of supersession and

an inscription of literary-historical continuity,” and both a critique and imitation

(Hutcheon 35). Moreover, this transformative potential makes parody a worldly text

because it adapts to the social context and the present interests.

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Parody and dialogism meet at the ground of referentiality. According to

Hutcheon, “Postmodernist metafiction’s parody and the ironic rhetorical strategies

that it deploys are perhaps the clearest modern examples of the Bakhtinian

‘double-voiced’ word” (72). Namely, double-voicedness occurs in the “reported

speech,” that reprocess the past speeches and that is absolutely referential—“as

discourse within and about discourse” (Hutcheon 72). Parody engages with the past in

dialogic discourse.

In The Enchantress of Florence, the parodic frame continues and reactivates

history; the recorded Florence and the Mughal Empire and their people are at once

“re-presented” and reappropriated. This ambivalent relationship between The

Enchantress of Florence and its model of history is set off from its dialogic discourse

in which hybridized relations exist. Incorporated genres and literary allusions are both

manifestations of the referentiality of dialogism. In addition, the dialogic concept

exists within The Enchantress of Florence’s parodic structure, which intensifies the

interactions and relationships among the author, the character and the reader. In the

end, this circulated power—that each refers to the other displays that power

relationship can be inverted, even the one between the real and unreal.

History in Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and in

Postmodernist Theory

There have been debates centering on the problem of representation in the realm

of historiography, because history is a mediated idea that is liable to intended

distortions of truth. Distortions of history give access to the advanced control over

both public and personal realms. Louis Wolf, in his discussion of government

manipulation of history, urges the modern historians of our current day to “reach

beyond the ‘official,’ government-issue version of ‘history’" (Wolf). There is the

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obvious gap that Wolf observes that is between a sensationalized narrative disguised

as truth and the sober truth in our historical texts. Meanwhile, dichotomizing fictional

and factual writings has become the norm in terms of literary categorization. Yet,

when it comes to the issue of reality, historical writing and fictional works do not

necessarily contradict each other. History and fictions seemingly belong to different

realms, but when the problem of representing truth becomes the focal point of the

postmodernist age, the two disciplines: history and literature begin their interactions.

We tend to expect historical knowledge to be a truthful recount of the past, and

coming from this point, the decided foundation of historical writing is factuality.

Alan Sheridan sympathizes with this view by expounding his personal analysis on the

subject; he says: “'[h]istory suggests a certain assurance, sanctioned by an institution,

a discipline and, ultimately, reason itself" (13). Tracing this realist thesis back to the

eighth century BC, Aristotle speaks of the distinction between history and poetry.

Beverly Southgate says that Aristotle considers the significance of poetry greater than

that of history, for that ‘poetry is chiefly conversant about general truth, history about

particular’ (qtd. in Southgate 14). Conclusively, history is about events fixed in the

past, and therefore, the particularity and certainty limit the compass of imagination

and the flexibility of exploring different perspectives to ponder upon general truth.

Nonetheless, the acquisition of historical knowledge takes a linguistic turn in the

twentieth century, and this trend informs us that history cannot escape narrativity.

Under the threat of the postmodernist thesis which proposes an anti-realist value,

historians are confronted with the idea that whether there are truthful accounts of the

past. Postmodern theory of history rests on the notion that the “past cannot be the

object of historical knowledge” and therefore, “the past is not and cannot be the

referent of historical statements […]” (Zagorin 13-14). This narrativist value of

history entails treating history as an inevitably fictional nature that makes history

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seem somehow no different than fictional stories (Zagorin 14). Postmodernism sees

truth as an ideological construct especially by the hegemonic groups. History is

regarded as a filtered product, changing its status with the present discourse. Thus, the

postmodernist approach to history is closely linked to two theses which Zagorin

points out: “anti-realism” and “narrativism” (13-14).

Historical facts, though seemingly static and enclosed, are actually open to

(re)interpretations. This does not renounce the existence of facts, nor does it imply

that historical writing is ultimately pointless. However, it reveals how facts cannot

represent themselves without the process of interpretation. History inevitably enters

the imaginative realm when it is represented.

The fact that historical representation is by no means simply the duplication of

truth offers a new route to examining reality, as F.R. Ankersmit points out: “History is

the first discipline that comes to mind if we think of disciplines attempting to give a

truthful representation of a complex reality by means of a complex text” (3). Both the

concept of reality and the process of literary construction are complex in nature.

Increasing in complexity, historical writing itself is a form of literary construction;

literary works inevitably consist of the author’s voices and adaptations of “truths.”

Thus, historical writing (representation) admittedly poses “new and interesting

problems, both unstatable and unsolvable within the parameters of existing

philosophy of language” (Ankersmit 3). The connection between history and

postmodernism can be further explicated with Michel Foucault’s genealogical history

which substantiates the postmodernist conception of history.

As a postmodern philosopher of history, Foucault’s association with the

postmodernist view of history is apparent (Thompson 74). In his essay: ‘Nietzsche,

Genealogy, History,” Foucault’s genealogical history provides a non-linear view of

history that probes into the concept of origin, draws attention to representations of

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history, and shows its capability of self-awareness.

Paul A. Bové defines genealogical history in his analysis of the three modern

genealogists—Nietzsche, Foucault and Said:

[…] genealogy is itself a systematic representation of the intellectual and of

“objects” of knowledge—even if an ironic subversion of all other

systems—and, as a result, “the relation of the individual subject to systems

of representation must be reconsidered. (380)

Genealogical history focuses on representations, that is, performativity, instead

of providing objective truth. In Lynn Fendler’s words, genealogy is not a statement

but a performative utterance that “does” something instead of “saying” something

(450). Hence, what genealogy proposes is political effectiveness—it is a performative

critique, an incitement of discord and an interpretive authority that facilitates

communications (Fendler 451-53). In this genealogical sense, history is not a static,

objective matter, but rather an interpreted and, therefore, politicized tool.

Behind the ideas of the event, the body and the performative role genealogical

history plays, the primary concern in genealogy is to problematize the pleasing idea of

origin. Jeffrey T. Nealson notes that genealogy counters the search for origins: “that is,

it opposes itself to the search for conditions of possibility” (Nealson). In Nealson’s

definition, what contrasts the conditions of possibility are the conditions of

emergence—Nietzsche’s “Entstehung,” and Foucault’s “event” (Nealson).

Though advocating an alternative historical view, genealogical method, much

like the postmodern strategy, recognizes its limits. Understanding how each era is

affected by the power relations, genealogy is aware of its “perspectival limits” of the

present (Fendler 454). Although genealogical history repudiates the grand view of

history, it retains its “meta-professional” authority, and this is precisely the

paradoxical characteristic of genealogical history. In addition, genealogy embodies

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the contradictions by practicing what it critiques, as Habermas points out:

“genealogical historiography emerges from its cocoon as precisely the presentistic-,

relativistic-, cryptonormative illusory science that it does not want to be” (qtd. in

Fendler 459). With the elements above-mentioned, genealogical history best expresses

itself in the form of parody, for both genealogical history and parody question origin

and authoritative voice while embodying the authority. Moreover, they both perceive

their restrains. In brief, genealogy opens itself up to emergence, events, and

discontinuity. Accordingly, genealogy opposes the notion of the essence in historical

development; there is no center or origin from which historical events unfold.

In the intersected ground in The Enchantress of Florence, where contradicting

values encounter: the East and West, the present (author’s intention) and the past

(history,) and also reality and fantasy, the background text—history— becomes the

open text inviting the descendants to use and abuse. Not only are the fictional

characters constantly in competition with the historical figures, the parodied version

of history is also continually confronted by the prior text—the officially recorded

history. Furthermore, this parodied history in The Enchantress of Florence both

creates and critiques, in its conscious act of performance. Conclusively, this

artificially constructed history is indispensable in the course of the inspection of the

concept of history.

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Chapter Three

A Postmodern Parody: The Enchantress of Florence

History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of

being given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices,

misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and

knowledge.

—Salman Rushdie, IH 25

The Enchantress of Florence is a novel composed of revised historical truths that

enable imaginary encounters between the East and West. Through this staged

East-West encounter, The Enchantress of Florence presents a multiplicity of forms of

hybridity. Neuman points out that this novel is at once a “globe-traversing prose

romance” and a historical fantasy; its ambivalence mirrors its theme of hybridization

and form of parody (Neuman 676). The multi-layeredness and hybridity come from

the structure of The Enchantress of Florence that is made up of layers of tales and

interweaving ideologies from both the past and the present. I propose to approach The

Enchantress of Florence with the emphasis on both its form and content; that is, in the

light of a parody.

The Enchantress of Florence embodies the dialogic discourse with both its form

and content. Dialogism manifested in this novel firstly with various relationships: that

between forms—history and the novel, between the encoder and decoder—the author

and reader, and between unreality and reality. In the end, The Enchantress of

Florence unleashes contingency, and creates a world that is transforming with the

present time.

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An underlying network in which The Enchantress of Florence develops its

storyline and form is the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism thematized in The Dialogic

Imagination. The dialogic capacity of The Enchantress of Florence is performed with

the incorporation of the two disciplines—the novel and history, and with polyphonic

intentions. According to Bakhtin, the novel itself functions as parody that

contemporizes the past models:

Alongside direct representation—laughing at living reality— there flourish

parody and travesty of all high genres and of all lofty models embodied in

national myth: The ‘absolute past’ of gods, demigods and heroes is here, in

parodies even more so in travesties, ‘contemporized’: it is brought low,

represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday

environment, in the low language of contemporaneity. (Bakhtin 21)

The novel contemporizes the absolute past that is long celebrated in the other poetic

genres and makes this absolute past accessible and transformable with everyday life.

Intertextual Bouncing

Truth is restored by reducing the lie to an absurdity, but truth itself does not

seek words; she is afraid to entangle herself in the word, to soil herself in

verbal pathos.

—Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, DI 309

Intertextuality is based on the texts being context-dependent and their therefore

incompleteness without the readers’ recognition of their relations to other discourses.

Michael Riffaterre explains the working of intertextuality: “the perception that our

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reading of a text or textual component (paragraph, sentence, phrase, or word) is

complete or satisfactory only if it constrains us to refer to or to cancel out its

homologue in the intertext” (Riffaterre 374). Intertexts demand the reader’s keen

perception of their references, or they fail to construct the intertextual relations.

Meanwhile, intertextuality defined by Ann Pearson suggests two aspects related to

dialogism: the act of re-authoring and the dialogic relation between different

discourses (of different periods of time): “It can refer both to a condition under which

all texts originate and to a practice: that is, the appropriation and ‘reauthoring’ of texts

for new purposes, an act that subverts modern Western conventions of authorship,

property, and origin between different time frames” (Pearson 262). The process of

reinvention and the exchanges between texts, the two features of intertextuality

together with the role of the decoder contribute to the narrative of The Enchantress of

Florence. I will begin the discussion of intertextuality with literary allusion which

concerns the intertextual relations between One Thousand One Nights and The

Enchantress of Florence. I will then begin with historical references.

Literary allusion is one of the most salient features of The Enchantress of

Florence. According to Amara, The Enchantress of Florence’s Akbar and Mogor

allude to Invisible Cities, its border-crossing to The White Castle, and its art and

reality to My Name is Red. In addition to those literary allusions, Ecaterian Patrascu

also reminds us this novel’s literary interactions with several other novels. Qara Köz

resembles Sierva Maria in Of Love and Other Demons. Akbar and Jodha’s story

parallels to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Literary allusions

complicate a novel with their interweaving stories. Yet, rather than simply quoting

other texts, or merely create competition between texts, the parodic discourse creates

several kinds of symbiotic relationships. The “cross-pollination” of literary works

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demonstrates the novel’s parodic tendency to refer to the past models (Mack xiii). The

process of decoding a parody yields to the symbiotic relationship between the

storyteller and the listener.

Among these works, One Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights’

Entertainments is the one literary forefather central to The Enchantress of Florence.

Amara notes the literary tradition of the “Indo-Persian storytelling” within The

Enchantress of Florence: “lush images, forked progressions and digressions, its

obliterations of boundaries between magic and reality,” (Amara 13). Amara’s

observation of this imitation of The Nights accurately responds to Rushdie’s

explanation of the purpose of this novel. Rushdie admits in an interview that The

Enchantress of Florence is a novel about “the persuasion, or the persuasiveness, or

not, of storytelling” (“Random House of Canada”). Rushdie himself does not

persuade his readers; he makes the protagonists do the work of persuasion. In The

Enchantress of Florence, all characters take part in storytelling and many storytellers

sell their imagination in exchange for life. This is the fabric of The Nights, which in

turn structures The Enchantress of Florence.

More than “lush images, forked progressions and digressions, its obliterations of

boundaries between magic and reality,” The Enchantress of Florence reflects The

Nights’ theme of storytelling and mirrors The Nights’ status as a collage of cultures

and literary allusions. Rushdie recreates a literary world in which the Eastern and

Western cultures meet through acts of storytelling. The Nights, however, itself is a

meeting point for the East and West. “As we shall see, some of the most popular

stories in The Nights (the so-called ‘orphan stories’, including ‘Aladdin; or, the

Wonderful Lamp’) appear never to have been part of the ‘real’ Eastern collection at all,

and were for a long time thought to have been the intrusive products of the Western

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imagination” (Mack xii). Mack notes the western literary influences on The Nights,

saying that Sinbad’s third journey resembles Odysseus’ adventure, “The Story of the

Enchanted Horse” bears a recognizable similarity to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,

and “The Story of the Sleeper Awakened” contains the same formal sameness as

William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (xiii). Both The Nights and The

Enchantress of Florence are syntheses of many cultures and social discourses through

time. Yet, the dialogic circulation of The Nights differs from that of The Enchantress

of Florence. The Nights’ individual tales are passed down orally through time,

remaining unorganized until the early nineteenth century (Mack xii). The Enchantress

of Florence is a crafted unity designed to express the author’s bent or direct intentions

through the pathos of that age.

The Nights and The Enchantress of Florence also distinguish themselves from one

another in the ways they incorporate magic:

In these stories, the Arabs are portrayed as inhabitants of a magical and

mysterious kingdom of boundless wealth and unutterable beauty, full of Jinns,

devils and goblins, men flying in the air, flying horses, magic, a Dance of Death,

and supernatural birds, talking fishes, and exotic scenes of harems, slaves,

eunuchs, princes, and kings along with wonderful stories like those of Ali Baba

and Sindbad. (Al-Olaqi 384)

In The Nights, magic has the same status as the living reality. In The Enchantress of

Florence, nonetheless, magic shares the same status as religion, a form of imagination

that is subsumed under reality. Akbar pondered the existence of this form of

imagination: “If man had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it

possible for a creation to escape the power of the creator?” (Rushdie, The Enchantress

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of Florence 88). Although Rushdie attempts to write a world of the harmonious

relationship between magic and other forms of beliefs, he does not create a world in

which magic shares the equal footing as reality. The magic has no visual forms in The

Enchantress of Florence; it merely has effects and fades when the believers cease to

show interest in it. Dashwanth can enter the realm of his imagination because of his

strong indulgence in his make-belief world. Qara Köz’ power to enchant is given by

both the narrator and the believers of her world. Her power eventually fades near the

end of her storyline.

The Enchantress of Florence and The Nights share the similitude of their

incorporated cultures and histories. The Nights presents stories as the reality while

The Enchantress of Florence exhibits a world where stories and reality interfere in

each other’s realms. Through the competitive relationships between imagination and

facts, The Enchantress of Florence deconstructs the dual and equal positions of

imagination and reality in The Nights.

Imagination is both partly reality and partly an issue in The Enchantress of

Florence. Characters at times are made to make references to other literary works

which mirror themselves as a parodic gesture to remind the reader of this novel’s

distance from those works. Jodha unknowingly mentions the Pygmalion myth and

criticizes its simplicity. Jodha thought this ancient tale “could not be compared to her

actual existence” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 50). Qara Köz reacts to the

protagonist Angelica from Orlando Innamorato whose name she takes after: “’poor

Angelica! So many pursuers, so little power with which to resist them, or to impose

her own will upon them all!” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 295). These

meta-fictional gestures make apparent the ongoing dialogism between two realms:

reality and imagination.

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The Enchantress of Florence’s reauthoring of The Nights intensifies the

interchanging powers of reality and imagination and presents those incorporated

characters and storylines as incomplete, therefore welcoming texts that can continue

their transformation through reader’s active reading. Furthermore, The Enchantress of

Florence’s meta-fictional features reveals the inescapable nature of “historical

layering” of narratives and hence undermines the notion of authenticity through

literary reworking (Pearson 262). Consequently, the new purpose that The

Enchantress of Florence achieves with its literary reworking on The Nights is readers’

rising awareness of the transformative process of storytelling.

Distancing the reader from the story he or she immerses in, The Enchantress of

Florence presents a different form of framing narrative from that of The Nights.

Parody manifests the dialogic interaction between these two texts and also between

the readers’ and the characters’ reality.

In The Enchantress of Florence, intertextuality signifies not only the

incorporation of literary texts but also of different discourses. The two

genres—history and the novel—both take part in the tales of The Enchantress of

Florence, at times as direct speeches and at other times as refracted voices. That is,

these historical events, figures and voices are at times presented through direct

quotations in the novel while at other times they are exhibited in a distance from the

original historical discourse.

The dialogic relations manifest in the juxtaposition of the historical discourse

and Rushdie’s imagination. First, the novel is set at the clashes of ideologies—the

East and West and the medieval and the Renaissance, providing Rushdie a design of a

world representing multiplicity. Secondly, the major scenes are deliberately

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constructed on the border of reality—Fatehpur Sikri in The Enchantress of Florence is

in between the fanciful and real. The stories mainly take place in Sikri, “an urban

form in transition between camp and metropolis” (Richards 29). Despite Sikir’s

existence being historically grounded, the Sikri in The Enchantress of

Florence undergoes the process of mystification, appearing as a mirage: “Most cities

start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri

would always look like a mirage” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 29).

Correspondingly, the time of the novel—Renaissance Florence also marks a

transitional ground—the birth of the modern world. The medieval and modern worlds

are drawn in the dialogue. The historical background in The Enchantress of

Florence responds to the author and reader’s present intention and therefore stays in

the moment of transformation.

Italian cities in the Renaissance time undergo an ideological change marked as

the predawn to the modern world by the Western canonical thinking (Athanasios

Moulakis 7). In this transitional period, the Renaissance texts are full of ambiguities;

its culture is packed with confidence of individualism that both liberates creative

energies and invites anomie (Moulakis 7). Meanwhile, the Mughal Empire under the

legendary emperor Akbar’s rule recaptures the lands, and its glory lasts for a hundred

and seventy years. Like Florence, the Mughal Empire is a “dynamic, centralized,

complex organization”; there are frequent flows of human and financial resources as

well as information (Richards 1). Both powerful cities exhibit historical

cosmopolitanism, parochialism and shifts of world view.

Moreover, Florence, according to Neuman, is greatly impacted by “mercantile

capitalism” and the “revival of classical aesthetics” (676). Gradually, Florentines

experience this paradigmatic shift from “the enchanted world of medieval

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Christendom” to the above-mentioned capitalist ideology (Neuman 676). This time of

the human history is confronted by both ethos of decadence and the spirit of rebirth;

the clashing ideologies, the double, or even multiple values and voices are both the

cause and effect of the this transforming century. Rushdie in the interview answers:

“What you see is the world we now live in just being born […] and that is true

everywhere” (The Film Archives). The new era, new perspective and new world are

now in the process of becoming. Therefore, Rushdie chooses to depict this time and

place not without its emblematic purpose— its specific atmosphere where

hybridization is constantly at work.

However, Rushdie disregards the also prevailing “disenchantment thesis,” as

Neuman points out, in pursuit of the portrayal of “the realpolitik of the Medici family

and Florentine sexual libertinism” (677). Seeking to depict the similarities of the two

worlds—Sikri and Florence, Rushdie does not focus on the topic of Renaissance

movement. Instead, Rushdie calls forth the ethos of decadence—“sexual

licentiousness, and a thriving public culture of prostitution” (Neuman 679). He builds

Sikri as a “liberal citadel” that is “extremely permissive and Florence as an alternative

reality, basing the public life on sensuality (Patrascu 3).

In other words, this parody of history quotes history partially, incorporating

imagination and overt literariness in order to present a world of dialogic forces. The

Enchantress of Florence is a “plural text” in terms of how its time situates in the

encounters of discourses and its place located in the grey zone between the real and

unreal.

Together with the time and space of history, historical events, when parodied,

liberates the space between the two discourses—one that concerns truth and the other

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one that performs truth. The Pazzi Conspiracy can serve as an example to demonstrate

how Rushdie reappropriates this historical episode in an ironic tone.

In 1478, the conspirators Pope Sixtus IV, his nephew Gerolamo Riario, the

Pazzie family and Archbishop Salviati attacked Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici in a

cathedral. Lorenzo escaped with injuries while his brother Giuliano was stabbed to

death. The conspirators were later caught by Florentines and henceforth “the Medici

remained firmly entrenched in power” ("Pazzi Conspiracy"). The following excerpt

presents the ridiculed performance of the Pazzi Conspiracy in The Enchantress of

Florence:

Bernardo ran with the two boys, scared and excited at the same time, just

like they were. Bernardo was a bookish man, boyish, sweet, and blood was

distasteful to him, but a hanging archbishop was different, that was sight

worth seeing. The boys carried tin cups with them in case of useful drips. In

the Piazza they ran into their pal Agostino Vespucci blowing loud

raspberries at the murderous dead and making obscene masturbatory

gestures at their corpses and shouting “Fuck you! Fuck your daughter! Fuck

your sister! Fuck your mother and your grandmother and your brother and

your life and her brother and her mother and her mother’s sister too.

(Rushdie 142)

The father of il Machia and the boys—il Machia, Nino Argalia and AgostinoVespucci

together witness the commonly accepted performance of execution. The grandeur of

this supposedly grim scene became a vulgar, sexualized and unimportant experiment

among those boys: “[t]he boys carried tin cups with them in case of useful drips”

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 142). The symbolic presence of the

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archbishop, a demonstration to generate fear and appreciation of Medici’s power

becomes an object of the three boys’ childish hunt for a mistaken tale of mandrake.

The original version and the parodied version of the Pazzi Conspiracy are at once

shown in difference and similarity. When the structure of this historical event

provides the audience a spectacle of punishment, this parodic version belittles the

execution and lightens its effect. In this parody, the original version of history,

however, is not subsumed under the parodic one. The truth, as Bakhtin contends,

becomes clear when it is completely deflated to an absurdity—“Truth is restored by

reducing the lie to an absurdity, but truth itself does not seek words; she is afraid to

entangle herself in the word, to soil herself in verbal pathos” (309). The two versions

of truth are juxtaposed, the original history and Rushdie’s parodied history reveals

each other, through the act of mirroring.

The combination of high and low is manifested in this parodic passage. In this

part of the novel, parody’s crooked nature fully exploits the Pazzi conspiracy, turning

the epic and tension-filled political crisis into an everyday episode of the three boys’

juvenile adventure. The result of this act of parodying history incorporates another

renowned concept of Bakhtin’s: the carnival. Bakhtin’s dialogism and carnival go

along with the populist concept, as Hoy mentions the recognizable social aspect of

dialogism, saying that dialogism is “the unmasking of social languages” (769). This

passage presents different social discourses, performed by the three teenage boys and

the historical background of the hanging. The carnival, according to Hoy when

analyzing Clair Will’s feminist approach to carnival, places “public indecency” and

“official order” in proximity (777). The combination of high and low also presents

itself in this episode as the oxymoronic representation of death and birth. Instead of

glorifying the circle of life, Rushdie diverts the attention to the sexual images. Adding

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to the irony is the demystification of the mandrake root; in later part of the tale, the

mandrake is proven to be a mere poisonous plant instead of a sorcerous root.

In conclusion, the historical events depicted in The Enchantress of Florence do

not avoid being mystified and are outwardly perspectival; they can be mistaken, or

trivialized. This promotes the postmodernist idea of history—whether history can

retrieve the past as it was. In this novel, history does not necessarily represent truth,

and the boundaries between facts and fiction become blurred. In this way, both fact

and fantasy are made transformable, and their relationship becomes a mutually

accessible one.

This remaking of history also indicates the prevailing postmodern phenomenon

in the rejection of the universal truth. This does not annihilate the existence of reality,

but instead, it demonstrates how truth is multi-formed and ever transforming. In The

Enchantress of Florence, perspectival history overpowers the stability of

facts. Although heavily dependent on historical facts, The Enchantress of

Florence dramatizes history, making history an object to be reused and reinfused with

new intentions. That is, rather than presenting the sixteenth century Florence and

Mughal Empire in the styles of encyclopedia or history, The Enchantress of

Florence shows an obviously crafted historical narration that is filtered through

multiple perspectives.

Combined with the fictional and historical images, Akbar becomes a paradoxical

epic hero. The epic narration of Akbar presents the emperor as magnificent as the one

in history, and yet, this narrative at the same time exposes the hypocrisy emanated

from the epic ambience. This novel’s narrative treatment reevaluates Akbar the Great

in an ambivalent way—it at once familiarizes and distances the reader from the

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emperor. The historically recorded Akbar the Great is transformed into the

non-traditional epic hero in this novel by the double-voiced speech of the narrator and

characters.

Traditionally, the epic hero, according to Bakhtin, possesses these traits—“he is

all of a piece, he has no shell, there is no nucleus within” and “lacks any ideological

initiative (heroes and author alike lack it)” (35). The epic hero is a completed image

that does not transform, and he does not have pluralistic views towards the world. In

addition, the world is one single, completed reality to the epic hero and the author.

The Enchantress of Florence pieces together the image of the realistic Akbar, who is

paradoxical and self-contradicting—“A Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted

only peace, a philosopher-king” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 36).

Realism incorporated here is ironically the key to subvert the epic image of Akbar.

Akbar is ever transforming, self-contradicting, unlike the epic hero who is

single-purposed and one-dimensional. Together with these paradoxical traits, Akbar’s

eclectic inclination and faith in diversity both reflect accurately the historical Akbar

and enrich the heroic depiction of Akbar in the novel.

On the one hand, The Enchantress of Florence meticulously depicts Akbar’s

identity, genealogy, philosophy, his progressive thoughts and paradoxical

traits—“Nowadays it was all victories but the emperor knew all about defeat. Defeat

was his father. Its name was Humayun” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 40).

Moreover, this novel recreates the exact replica of the historical Akbar—his orphaned

childhood, struggles in adolescence, and success as a young emperor.

Historically, Akbar is highly regarded, praised for his religious tolerance,

advanced ideal of pluralism:

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Akbar’s ambition was to gather the diverse peoples of the subcontinent

under his benevolent wings, to enable them, through religious and cultural

syncretism, to live in peace and amity. In this vision, and in his intellectual

openness and rationalism, this sanguinary medieval autocrat was a

thoroughly modern man, ahead of his time, and in some ways ahead even of

our time. (Thiara 417).

The above quoted historical fact shows that Akbar the Great, or Abū al-Fatḥ Jalāl

al-Dīn Muḥammad Akbar, is known not only for his remarkable expansion of the

Mughal Empire and his competence and bravery on the battlefield, but also for his

religious tolerance and his appreciation for art, poetry and philosophy. The statement

saying Akbar is even ahead of our time conveys the common perception of this

Mughal king. The historical narrative treats Akbar with great esteem.

On the other hand, Rushdie also incorporates the “comic familiarization” of

Akbar by purposely revealing his highly praised image. Comic familiarization can be

in the form of quasi-direct speech. In this novel, both the narrator and the characters

are in complicity, revering Akbar excessively. The author, the narrator and the

characters around Akbar seem to share one unified opinion about Akbar, yet, in

this quasi-direct speech, the intention belonging to the characters and to the discourse

of that time is already bent by the author.

The narrator’s conscious use of excessive praise for Akbar delivers its opposite

meaning: “the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the

repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the

gloriousness of his glory” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 33). Here comes the

interference of parody’s function that parody is a “metaphor for broader contexts”—

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The readers of this novel “are never allowed to abstain from recognizing the parody or

from judging and questioning themselves” (Hutcheon 92). The exact reenactment of

the grand narration of Akbar forces the reader to evaluate the heaped praise.

“Doubly great” and “necessary” denote an ironic intention from the author, revealing

how Akbar is extraordinary because he is made to be. Imitating the praise of Akbar

creates a critical distance that exposes Akbar’s hyperbolic greatness.

The theme of plurality emerges not only in the parodic representation of

historical figures, it presents itself through as the fundamental feature of Akbar the

emperor: “this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this

many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural”

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 33). Akbar is a symbol of plurality because of

the weight of history his genealogical inheritance endows upon his identity; he carries

the blood of the world-renown warrior —Temüjin. At the same time, Akbar does not

fatalistically accept one kind of identity that is passed down from his ancestors.

Akbar’s rejection of following the genealogy of barbarians reveals Rushdie’s

intention to advocate plurality. As Patrascu reveals, The Enchantress of

Florence delivers a message—the praise of plurality. Each individual, just like Akbar,

is “born into plurality” (Patrascu 33). This plurality also involves the individual

freedom to decide whether to continue the history he is born into or break away from

it. Furthermore, Akbar is also plural because of the nationalist identity he bears: “he

naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities

and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants

and trees within his frontiers […]” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 33). Akbar

stands for history, the continuation of his forefathers but he seeks to differ from

history at the same time. Akbar is the sum of his empire, because he knows his

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presence is symbolic of the entire empire. However, Akbar does not simply imitate

history; Akbar seeks difference in this sameness and creates his own pluralistic

identity.

Akbar’s complexity makes himself an ambivalent figure. Akbar embodies

paradoxes. He is a despot who advocates plurality, an illiterate connoisseur and a

believer of uncertainty: “[Akbar] knew that life was not to be trusted, the world was

not to be relied on” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 62). Lastly, Akbar is

capable of conjuring his world by both military force and imagination: “In this place

he would conjure a new world, a world beyond religion, region, rank and tribe”

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 45).

In conclusion, Rushdie projects the concept of plurality onto the historical figure

Akbar. Rushdie believes that plurality and difference are the key to rein a nation like

India: “For a nation of seven hundred millions to make any kind of sense, it must base

itself firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance, of devolution

and decentralization wherever possible” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 44). A

unified entity stays unified by means of tolerance and acceptance to plurality. This is

also the ultimate wish of Rushdie’s in his personal experience with the fatwa. The

authoritative voice of religion goes against the very core value Rushdie

believes—plurality. Meanwhile, when depicting Akbar, Rushdie inevitably creates the

same Akbar with critical difference. Akbar in this novel represents the epic hero while

reflects the hyperbolic nature of such a figure. Through the rewriting of Akbar,

Rushdie refracts his wish of plurality.

Meanwhile, the image of the silenced Queen Jodhha is a result of the

combination of the historical and fictional. In The Enchantress of Florence, the

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women’s identities are constructed by male sexual desire; those images of women are

the syntheses of men’s idealized women—pure, competent yet submissive. Hence, the

female characters such as Jodha and Qara Köz have power under men’s

dominance. On the other hand, the further mystification of Jodha’s identity in The

Enchantress of Florence allows the reader to both feel sympathetic for and detached

from her voiceless and mistaken identity.

The identity of Jodha in this novel is the representation of novelistic

mystification, the lack of autonomy as a female historical figure, and the constructed

truth. Queen Jodha’s ghostly presence bears a significant meaning because she at once

mirrors and contradicts the historical Jodha. The fictional Jodha’s suspended

existence becomes a vessel through which the reader explores the idea of given

reality.

Bouncing between the historical text and the fictional one, the image of Jodha

displays a problematic identity—the voiceless female in history and her status as a

historical text narrated by others. The dialogic interaction lies in between the

character Jodha and the historical Jodha. Jodha is constructed by both mirroring and

reinventing. Both versions of Jodha have no voice or autonomy, and both fictional

and historical Jodhas are entirely context-dependent and paradoxical.

The identity of the fictional Jodha is further mystified and intensified. She

embodies the metaphorical female who is completely dominated by male sexual

desire and imagination. Meanwhile, historically, Jodha’s identity revolves around

Akbar. Without Akbar, Jodha would not exist in history or in the text. To mirror

Jodha’s voiceless self, the fictional Jodha is presented as one that is always restricted

within imagination. Her status is an aesthetic work of collages: “So: the limitless

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beauty of the imaginary queen came from one consort, her Hindu religion from

another, and her uncountable wealth from yet a third” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of

Florence 48). Jodha’s absolute abstraction is paradoxically formed from bits of reality;

she is the collage of many women and Akbar’s perfected projection of women. In a

sense, Jodha is like a work of art, imitating reality yet without autonomy. Jodha is

forever trapped in between the real and ideal; that is, she will never fully come to

life.

Furthermore, an interesting piece of information connects the historical Jodha to

the fictitious one. The name of the Queen is misinformation, in history, from others’

false belief and in the novel, from the emperors’ mindless imagination. In Thiara’s

analysis of The Enchantress of Florence, she points out that “the popular perception

of Jodha or Jodhabai is to a great extent the creation of the epic Indian film

Mughal-e-Azam, directed by K. Asif and released in 1960, in which Jodha is

represented as Akbar’s faithful and loyal Hindu wife” (429). Rushdie has the fictional

Jodha respond to the historical one by an apparent misrepresentation. The Queen’s

actual name is Mariam-uz-zamani (Myviewprem). Rushdie admits in his speech at the

Rubin Museum in New York: “[t]he only Jodha in history is the second wife of

Jehangir and not his mother. So it is just a thing that has come up, exactly because

everybody believes that she exists” (qtd. in Mozumder). In reality, the name Jodha

belongs to Salim’s wife. In this parodic image of Jodha, the misconceived identity is

reconstructed and ingeniously used:

The emperor also believed his fictitious beloved was the mother of his

firstborn son, his long awaited firstborn son, conceived because of the

blessing of a saint, that very saint beside whose hilltop hovel this victory

city had been built. (Rushdie 48)

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Instead of correcting this misinformation, Rushdie transforms this collective fantasy

into the personal desire of Akbar. The Jodha in this novel is blatantly falsified, and

therefore utterly impossible—“She was an impossibility, a fantasy of perfection”

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 48).

There also exhibits the internal dialogization which is within “the subjective

belief system” of the listener when it comes to Jodha’s imaginary status (Bakhtin 282).

The impossibility of sheer imagination having an identity and influence on real-life

subjects confuses the reader. Having no footing in reality, the very idea of

imagination becomes an issue that Rushdie problematizes. Furthermore, the reader’s

apperceptive background is once again invaded by Jodha’s misrepresented identity.

The common opinion of Jodha is admittedly false by this further falsification.

Conclusively, both Jodha’s fictional and historical identities are constructed

textually, conjured by either distorted truth in the contemporary world or Akbar’s

imagination in the novel. Both versions of Jodha can never externalize themselves;

their voices are granted by others. In this way, the dialogic discourse circulates

between the fictional and historical identities of Jodha. Not only do they correspond to

each other, they also respectively interact with the present audience. The present

world gives Jodha a misremembered identity while the fictional world composes

Jodha with her surrounding reality. Both Jodhas have transformable identities that

open to the others to take part in, and in this parody, Jodha’s name is not corrected,

but explicitly inviting the reader to be wrong—“Truth is restored by reducing the lie

to an absurdity” (Bakhtin 309). Bakhtin’s observation of Rabelais’ parodic style

explains Rushdie’s intention to mystify Jodha to the fullest. Through the

intensification of the falsity, that is, Jodha’s identity, Rushdie’s narrative reveals the

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true status of Jodha—that Jodha exists in others’ narratives and that she cannot be

liberated from them.

Another’s Speech; Refracted Authorial Intentions

In parody, double-intentioned speech is utilized to encode the author’s opinion or

to create an awareness of the hypocrisy. Double-voicedness is one dialogic relation

most evidently presented in what Bakhtin calls “another’s speech,” and he defines

another’s speech as follows:

Another's speech-whether as storytelling, as mimicking, as the display of a

thing in light of a particular point of view, as a speech deployed first in

compact masses, then loosely scattered, a speech that is in most cases

impersonal ("common opinion," professional and generic languages)-is at

none of these points clearly separated from authorial speech: the boundaries

are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single

syntactic whole, often through a simple sentence […]. (308)

Another’s speech operates on the ground where the interplays with languages and

intentions are evident and where all these languages are inevitably tied to the

author’s. Bakhtin explains that these are the fundamentals in comic novels, which are

the “most basic forms that are typical for the majority of novel types” (301). The play

of speeches and the tension this juggling between speeches generates shape The

Enchantress of Florence into a parody of history.

Both pseudo-objectivity and quasi-direct speeches feature the interaction and

mutual dependence between the author, character and sometimes the

reader. In pseudo-objectivity and quasi-direct speeches, multiple intentions engage in

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the play of language. Pseudo-objectivity means “the logic motivating the sentence

seems to belong to the author, i.e., he is formally at one with it; but in actuality, the

motivation lies within the subjective belief system of his characters, or of general

opinion” (Bakhtin 305). This says how the character can in turn affect the text and the

author in the zone of his own—“his own sphere of influence on the authorial context

surrounding him, a sphere that extends-and often quite far-beyond the boundaries of

the direct discourse allotted to him” (Bakhtin 320).

Meanwhile, quasi-direct speeches seem to belong to the characters, but instead

they are already permeated and re-accented by the authorial intention. When

analyzing the novel Virgin Soil by Ivan Turgenev, Bakhtin points out that the

character’s interior monologue is “transmitted in a way regulated by the author,

with provocative questions from the author and with ironically debunking

reservations […]” (319). Thus the quasi-direct speech appears to be the monologue of

the character, while it is already complicated by the authorial intention and his ironic

re-accentuation. In conclusion, both pseudo-objective motivation and quasi-directness

are double-voiced speeches; yet, pseudo-objective voice disguises itself as the

author’s voice when it is the character expressing his or her intentions; whereas

quasi-direct speech is the merge of two voices.

These two forms of double-voicedness demonstrate how a seemingly single

totality is actually the combination of multiple contesting, contradicting or complicit

voices. The two kinds of “another’s speech” show how the dialogue between the

character and the author often appears as monologue—“inside this area a dialogue is

played out between the author and his characters—not a dramatic dialogue broken up

into statement-and-response, but that special type of novelistic dialogue that realizes

itself within the boundaries of constructions that externally resemble monologues”

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(Bakhtin 320). The dialogue between the character and the author, accordingly, is not

simply a “statement and response,” but the dialogue that recognizes both the

constructiveness of languages and that enables boundary-crossing between

languages.

This following example demonstrates the use of quasi-direct speech. This is an

episode in which Akbar’s mad elephant is supposed to perform the trial of “the

Garden of Hiran” on Mogor dell’Amore. Instead of stomping Mogor dell’Amore to

death, the mad elephant becomes quiet and calm, allowing Mogor dell’Amore to

caress him. When arguing with Birbal, Akbar’s wise consultant, Akbar says: “Here,

then, is an argument you will not be able to refute. The elephant’s judgment is

multiplied in potency if the emperor endorses it. If Akbar agrees with Hiran, then the

elephant’s wisdom is multiplied until it exceeds even yours” (Rushdie, The

Enchantress of Florence 102). The narrator disguises himself as Akbar. The narrator’s

point of view is in the guise of Akbar’s speech. Moreover, this speech directly

addresses the reader. When Akbar seems to jump out of the story frame, it is actually

the narrator who delivers the metafictional speech. This fact that “the elephant’s

judgment is multiplied in potency if the emperor endorses it” is intentionally parodic

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 102). On the surface the narrator attempts to

point out the “obvious fact” that the emperor decides the capacity of the elephant’s

intelligence; yet, in actuality he is aiming at exposing the hypocrisy of this “fact.”

Jodha, Akbar’s sheer imagination in The Enchantress of Florence, serves as

another example of double-speech. Johda’s interior monologues are oftentimes

Akbar’s interior monologues, which in turn, are Rushdie’s interior monologues.

Jodha thinks herself as the perfect woman representative of all women: “When a boy

dreams up a woman, he gives her big breasts and a small brain [..] when a king

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imagines a wife he dreams of me” ( Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 54). This

is also quasi-direct speech because Jodha is merely the projection of Akbar’s mind.

She cannot voice for herself. All of her interior monologues belong to others.

Jodha’s status reflects the silent queen figure in history and also all characters in

stories. Their identities are all made up by the author and re-imagined by the reader.

Its powers of enchantment needed no explanation and everyone who saw that

first painting realized that Dashwanth’s exceptional powers of intuition were

revealing the hidden princess as a born Enlightened One, who instinctively knew

what to do to protect herself, and also to conquer men’s hearts, which often

turned out to be the same thing. (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 127)

This part of the speech would be the example of pseudo-objectivity. The common

knowledge mixes with Rushdie’s. The image of princess becomes a co-creation of

“everyone” when she is a result of Rushdie’s artistic decisions. As a consequence, the

thought that belongs to the character “everyone” fuses with the narrator and Rushdie’s

voices. Gradually, Rushdie’s voice takes over that of the narrator’s and the

commoners.

The linguistic hybridity in the excerpts mentioned above is an act of authorial

unmasking. In the first quoted passage, the author exposes the extravagant authority

of Akbar by implementing his own authority. In the second quoted example, the

authorial voice intentionally fuses with the common belief and thus presents an ironic

juxtaposition of the people’s belief in the story with the reader’s. In this linguistic

hybridity, different voices do not just simply confront each other. Merger and disguise

take place in this limited realm. The author remains his highest position in this

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linguistic hierarchy. Meanwhile, this author’s finalization of the power game becomes

apparent only when the reader perceives it and decodes it.

The issue of authorship is at the core of these doubly-coded speeches. Language

is itself a contested field; it is never neutral and always political. The internal strata of

these speeches: the author’s, the narrator’s, the characters’ and the readers’ statements

enable the signifiers to have multiple signified simultaneously. Intentions (the

signified) compete against each other in double-voiced speeches that are

“overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (Bakhtin 294).

Because of the political nature of these double-speeches, parody presents the kind

of temporary liberation performed in the Bakhtinian carnival. The carnival in

Bakhtin’s theory demonstrates the slim freedom existent within the constraints of

official control:

The relativising potential of carnival practices thus offered an occasion for the

skids to be put under the prevalent truths of the medieval order, and it is because

of this, argues Bakhtin, that they were able to penetrate the realm of serious

culture so effectively during the social upheaval of the Renaissance. (Taylor 14).

Being able to subvert the original within its very own realm, parody is able to achieve

both “transgression” and “authorization” (Hutcheon 74). What lies within the

characters’ speeches is the author’s ironic inversion. On the contrary, in the speeches

which seem to be delivering the authorial intention there exist the characters’ own

aspect of reality.

Parody thus functions as not just “temporal telescoping,” but a medium through

which the readers “are never allowed to abstain from recognizing the parody or from

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judging and questioning themselves” (Hutcheon 92). Parody gets away with literary

confinements and presents the readers the hybrid consciousness that mirrors and

criticizes the tyrannical discourses.

Border-crossing between Reality and Imagination

Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it

may subsequently be reconstructed.

–Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands122

The represented and the presenter—creation and creator interact dialogically in

the relations between the famous painter Dashwanth and his paintings, Akbar and

Jodha, and Mogor and Qara Köz. These characters ultimately mirror the relations of

God and man, history and historian, and the Pygmalion tale. In the end, this

boundary-crossing from many directions suggest that the authority of reality in this

novel can be dismantled.

Mirroring relationships are one of the fundamentals in The Enchantress of

Florence, and Dashwanth is such a symbolic character that he mirrors characters of

creators: Akbar, the builder of Fatehpur Sikri, Mogor, the narrator of the hidden

princess, and finally the author Rushdie who creates the impossible encounter

between the Mughal Empire and Florence on page. Furthermore, Dashwanth is also

crucial to the story because he in a metaphorical sense creates the Mughal Empire:

[T]he union of the artists prefigured the unity of the empire and, perhaps,

brought it into being” and the hidden princess Qara Köz, under the command of

Akbar—“Paint her into the world […] for there is such magic in your brushes

that she may even come to life, spring off your pages and join us for feasting and

wine” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 126).

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Arts are just as believable as reality, and reality, in turn, becomes as abstract as

imagination. In the end, Dashwanth mirrors the Pygmalion sculptor—“Dashwanth

released into the only world in which he now believed, the world of the hidden

princess, whom he had created and who had then uncreated him” (The Enchantress of

Florence 135).

Correspondingly, the two female protagonists— Jodha and Qara Köz—

exemplify the power of creations by incarnating the Pygmalion myth. Jodha’s

existence parallels to the Pygmalion statue, only that she herself refuses to believe:

She had heard from the emperor a traveler’s tale of an ancient sculptor of

the Greeks who brought a woman to life and fell in love with her. That

narrative did not end well, and in any case was a fable for children. It could

not be compared to her actual existence. (Rushdie, The Enchantress of

Florence 50).

This is a quasi-direct speech that reveals both Jodha’s belief and the authorial

intention. Jodha’s actual existence is like the Pygmalion statue, being a figure of

fable. The irony lies in the fact that Jodha’s own voice has no validity, even for

herself. On the surface, Jodha falsely believes she is free like everyone else, although

being singularly the product Akbar imagines—“She was his mirror because he had

created her that way but she was herself as well” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of

Florence 52). Nevertheless, the narrator asks the rhetorical question to contradict

Jodha’s belief—“[w]as her will free of the man who had willed her into being?”

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 52). In conclusion, Jodha is a Pygmalion

figure who disbelieves in the Pygmalion dream. This shows how subjective belief

system only presents a part of the truth. Jodha’s faith in her own existence is

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self-deceiving. This further implicates the reality, which is formed by one’s belief,

can be false. Like Jodha, Qara Köz is another Pygmalion figure, whose seemingly

all-pervasive magic power only affects the believers of her tale.

Meanwhile, Qara Köz also exists in the story as a representation of art; her

appearance problematizes the concepts of identity and reality. Qara Köz’s textualized

self presents a dialogized identity that is at once a literary allusion and response to the

male gaze. Qara Köz is an artwork done by Mogor, Dashwanth and Rushdie.

Moroever, Qara Köz’s identity also references another text— her second name

Angelica alludes to Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. Angelica is a fictional character

in Orlando Innamorato whose enchanting beauty attracts eager suitors. Angelica

eventually leaves Orlando, which makes him insane. Qara Köz is a product of

imagination that is able to make a difference in the fictional world of The Enchantress

of Florence. Qara Köz’s responsibility for Dashwanth’s disappearance delineates the

circulated power relation that Rushdie points out in this novel: “the clutch or echo of

power could also be reversed. The salve girl could sometimes imprison the royal lady.

History could claw upward as well as down” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

132). In The Enchantress of Florence, power relations go in circulated motions.

Creator and creations do not stay in still positions.

Hence, the source of identity, origin, on the contrary, can be the result of identity

construction. This reduces the authoritative status of past in terms of identity.

According to Patrascu, Qara Köz represents the process of identity building

(12). Nonetheless, Qara Köz’s journey of identity building proves to be futile; she

eventually fades into a sort of ridiculed incestuous tale mirrored by camels—“The

physical freedom of the camel, we have always thought, offers a lesson in amorality

to mere human beings” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 369). Qara Köz

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ironically consumes the story and makes the story of Mogor an illegitimate

tale—“The Mirror’s daughter was the mirror of her mother and of the woman whose

mirror the Mirror had been” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 381).

Consequently, Mogor’s identity is not what he believes to be; he is the mirror of

the mirror of the Mirror. This destructs Mogor’s search for origin and the process of

Qara Köz’s identity forming only “enlarge[s] the nothingness of her existence”

(Patrascu 12). Conclusively, the idea of an actual past is shaky, as the past can be just

as inventive as any other imaginative entities.

Ultimately, this dialogic relation between those creators and their creations

mirrors the relationship between man and religion. Man, by believing in the purely

imaginative power, enter the realm of their own creation and become uncreated. This

explains why in The Enchantress of Florence, Akbar shows more than once his

distrust of religion—“He trusted beauty, painting, and the wisdom of his forebears. In

other things, however, he was losing confidence; in, for example, religious faith”

(Rushdie 62). Additionally, Akbar’s interior monologue, a set of rhetorical questions

best demonstrate how creation (god) can have power over its creator (man)—“If man

had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it possible for a creation to

escape the power of the creator? Could a god, once created, become impossible to

destroy? Did such fictions acquire an autonomy of the will that made them immortal?”

(Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence 88). The authorial intention is already evident

in these questions; Rushdie reminds the reader that creations become immortal only

by their creators’ insistent belief. All in all, through these dialogic relations between

creations and creators, the unresolvable situation in which man decidedly renounce

their power in god’s presence is reflected.

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Conclusively, this novel demonstrates that imagination can be the source of

reality, the boundary separating fiction and fact can be crossed from another

direction. This in turn deconstructs the authority of reality. The genius painter

Dashwanth materializes this theory, for he not only has the power to rewrite history

through art, but also crosses to the imaginary realm which he creates—“Dashwanth

released into the only world in which he now believed, the world of the hidden

princess, whom he had created and who had then uncreated him” (Rushdie, The

Enchantress of Florence 135). Creations prove to be a compatible force to their

conjurors and imagination no longer serves as a form of imitation of reality;

imagination can model reality.

Revealing the reversed relationship between art and reality, The Enchantress of

Florence also discloses the two principles of postmodernism; one is the linguistic

inclination in the postmodernist approach, and the other “its objection of realism”

(Zagorin 7). In Sofya Khagi’s review of Timur Kibirov’s poem “To Igor,” she notes

this reversed relationship between life and art in the light of dialogism— “the

perception of life as a ‘paraphrase’ of art” (590). The result is that “reality appears to

be bookish, fictitious, ‘read’” (Khagi 590). With the fusion of imagination, reality is

endowed with multiple possibilities. In The Enchantress of Florence, different belief

systems also display how “reality” is a relative concept. The traditional and religious,

the sorcerous, the humanist and aesthetic ideals cohabit in the story. Akbar’s

inclination of pantheism is also another indicator showing the preference for

multiplicity. Consequently, this novel displays the idea of decenterment, since reality

is no longer the base of all creations. Reality is context-dependent and relative. The

center of the world we perceive is thus deconstructed.

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On account of the reversed power relationship between the creator and his

creation, The Enchantress of Florence exposes the ambivalence regarding the concept

of reality. Furthermore, this novel’s multiple versions of voices and truth convey the

postmodern rejection of homogeneity. According to Neuman, Akbar in The

Enchantress of Florence views pluralism as an adequate system for abiding

dominance, which is in contrast with religion’s “transcendental justification for the

work and rhetoric of domination” (678). Postmodern concept of multiplicity also

manifests in Mogor dell’Amore’s conversation with Akbar: “I am attracted toward the

great polytheist pantheons because the stories are better, more numerous, more

dramatic, more humorous, more marvelous” (Rushdie, The Enchantress of

Florence 150).

Meanwhile, other forms of imaginative powers such as art and magic present

alternative beliefs to religion. This relationship between creations and their creators

parallels to that between man and god. Humans, the author of religious texts and

inventor of belief systems, submit themselves to their own imagination. Artistry can

prove to overpower their creators. Reality, the origin of identity and human subjects,

thus becomes problematic. The character Dashwanth bears an emblematic presence

indicating that history is an artifice, and reality can be the result of artistic

constructions. Furthermore, Dashwanth reveals that boundary-crossing—between

reality and imagination—can be done in another direction, which dismantles the

fixedness of reality.

Multi-voicedness, conclusively, not only manifests in the quasi-direct and

peusdo-objective speeches, it also appears in the conceptions of reality. Different

perceptions of truth construct an open-ended textual world of The Enchantress of

Florence. The parodied historical events, the way characters’ and authorial intentions

interact in speeches and the reversed power relationship between the creator and

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creation construct a world of enchanting multiplicity that is always engaged in

interactions and therefore ever transforming.

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Chapter Four

Conclusion

The Enchantress of Florence celebrates neither past nor present, but draws focus

on the reciprocal dimension between them. History in this novel is encoded with the

author’s narrative treatment and its meanings make sense only when they are decoded

by the reading act. Constructed with both the past and present voices, stories in The

Enchantress of Florence exhibit the dialogic interactions constituted by the hybrid

structures of the speeches and the ambiguity of the story, which are embodied in the

characters’ suspended statuses between fact and fiction as well as between subversive

and repressive powers. In this interstitial zone, The Enchantress of Florence comes to

terms with the past and breaks down the anxiety of influence that literary forefathers

create for their descendants.

In this thesis I analyze The Enchantress of Florence through the veins of dialogic

discourse. As Bakhtin explains, with different speech types heteroglossia enters the

novel and engages in the dialogic activity: “Authorial speech, the speeches of

narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental

compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorečie] can enter the novel”

(Bakhtin 300). The key concept of dialogism then lies in the interactions of the

multiplicitous units carried out by heteroglossia. I investigate that the dialogic

expression in The Enchantress of Florence appears through the representations of

another’s speech, intertextual bouncing and border-crossing.

Refracted Intentions can be manifested in many forms, but I focus on

pseudo-objective and quasi-direct speeches in the parodied history of The Enchantress

of Florence. Double-intentioned speeches as such enable parody’s function to critique,

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and it is also this dialogic interaction that performs parody’s “double-directionness.”

The characters’ and author’s belief systems are mixed and matched and deliberately

confusing in these two kinds of double voiced speeches. But it is also this

double-voicedness that accommodates both the decoder and encoder to communicate.

Furthermore, this encoded text is at the same time context-dependent because its

double intentions often come from the author’s socio-ideological background.

Consequently, parodic texts are accessible for the readers and their present intentions

while maintaining its tie to history.

Briefly speaking, double-voicedness is structured as one speech, but with

multiple intentions. Voices of the author or the ethos the author tries to depict enter

characters’ speeches. In reverse, the characters’ intentions can at times disguise

themselves as the authorial speech. In this synthesis of voices, the narrator sways

between the author’s and the story’s temporal ethos. In The Enchantress of Florence,

the narrator sometimes speaks from the sixteenth century’s point of view while at

other times he seems to be on the contemporary side, judging the past events and

characters. In this regard, dialogism does not promote a static harmony of diverse

voices; instead, dialogism describes a unity embodying the competing diversity.

Caryl Emerson explains that there is this warring tendency in Bakhtin’s dialogic

analyses: “In his texts words are always competing, doing battle, winning and losing

territory” (xxxvii). Dialogism then entails more than dialogues between characters

and that between the author and reader. Dialogism includes the political liberalist

values; it encourages the existence of a pluralistic world celebrates freedom of

perspectives. Yet, dialogism does not necessary stress on equality. Each voice seeks to

dominate one another.

Intertextuality is another representation of dialogism, as intertextuality

essentially juggles two fundamentals. Intertexts come in many forms: fiction and facts,

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the novel and history, or even two paradigms—medieval and renaissance. When

parody engages two or more texts, it embodies one aspect of dialogism—the “artistic

recycling” (Hutcheon 15). In this part of the discussion, I draw focus on the parodied

historical events and characters. Akbar and Jodha, the two main characters in both

history and this novel, mediate the act of intertextual bouncing between different

stylistics. In The Enchantress of Florence, Akbar undergoes an epic transformation,

which ironically exposes the epicfication of this historical figure. Jodha, similarly,

goes through a further mystification in The Enchantress of Florence. In this novel,

Jodha becomes an “almost possible” character who lives only in people’s beliefs.

Jodha lacks autonomy as a result, and eventually gets replaced by another

fictionalized female figure—Qara Köz.

As a parody of history, The Enchantress of Florence re-appropriates history not

only with the ironic tone, but also with the magic realist approach. Fact and fiction are

dependent upon each other. Rushdie’s imagination takes effect on the basis of

historical validity. That is, the freedom of imagination is based upon the precision of

historical time and place. When this novel is located in between two ethos and two

cultures, it is inevitably a journey of clashing and harmonizing ideologies. The East

and West and the medieval and the Renaissance conjure up a world of multiplicity.

The mirage-like depiction of the city Fatehpur Sikri creates a perfect world of

dialogue between the fanciful and the real.

In its theme of border-crossing, The Enchantress of Florence establishes a place of

ambiguity. The theme of hybridity also takes the forms of the cultural encounter and

the suspended state between imagination and reality. The greatest painter in The

Enchantress of Florence—Dashwanth becomes subsumed in his own painting while

the enchantress Qara Köz freely spreads her magic charm of love across cultures.

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These two characters, together with the imagined Queen Jodha, present hybridity with

their identity. Their physical hybridity lies in their partly fictional and partly historical

background and their conscious hybridity comes from their struggles between striving

to gain autonomy and being pressured by the patriarchal system.

In brief, the hybrid voice in speeches, the dialogues between texts and the

suspension of disbelief between reality and artifice accomplish the dialogized

heteroglossia in The Enchantress of Florence. The result of the dialogic flows is the

undecidable statuses of the characters and the novel.

The Enchantress of Florence challenges the canonical status of history with its

parodic paradoxes. History is authoritative and it can be religious when there is this

urge to represent the past as it truly was. According to Southgate, before

postmodernism and postcolonial concepts arrived on stage, history was deemed

impersonal, didactic and moralistic. Although Rushdie’s novels have this tendency to

challenge history, it is The Enchantress of Florence that not only personalizes history

but also replaces didactic episodes with sexual licentiousness.

As a form commonly viewed as attack on the original texts, parody incorporates

more complex relations than mere antagonism. Hutcheon notes one fundamental

paradoxical value in parody: “anti-totalizing totalization” ( The Politics of

Postmodernism 63). The same discursive strategy goes to what Hutcheon describes in

A Theory of Parody as “authorized transgression” (75). Parody embodies conflicting

tendencies to both imitate and critique the main voice. Parody’s rebellious nature

challenges the dominant voice and its urge to become dominant forges parody’s

paradoxes.

Therefore, “repetition with critical difference,” similarity alongside difference, is

the key feature of parody (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 6). Similarity can be found

in the direct quotations or literal imitations. Nonetheless, this kind of borrowing in

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parody “establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon, A Theory of

Parody 8).The human race compared across time suggests that there are two temporal

as well as cultural entities coming into play. With Akbar’s empire and the enlightened

Florence and the world of the sixteenth century in comparison to the contemporary

one we live in, the reader finds out the coincidental pattern of human behavior. Yet

this mirroring suggests both similarity and difference; it in actuality presents

compatibility of two different entities. The past in The Enchantress of Florence shines

light on the contemporary by showing how similar humans behave in ways of

religious beliefs and thirst for power. Nonetheless, the history depicted in this novel

also presents a world of ventures and tolerance for imaginations which is in contrast

to the present world where Rushdie has encountered ruthless censorship that

“deaden[s] the imagination of people” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 39).

Meanwhile, difference creates a liberating potential, according to Patrick

Schmidt. When the parodic work deconstructs the original work, it creates a space for

imagination, for an “alternative use” (Schmidt 17). This feature of parody delimits

history from the narrative restrains. Showing historical facts on texts means the

inevitable issue of representation, since “any representation of [reality] is bound to be

partial and incomplete […]” (Thompson 55). This problem of representation is

essential to the postmodern thesis: “The first [postmodern] thesis is that of

anti-realism, which maintains that the past cannot be the object of historical

knowledge […]” (Zagorin 13). The past is a separate entity which cannot be wholly

obtained. In fact, according to Southgate, all history is ideological because it

inevitably goes through the mediations of perspective and political agenda. History

and fiction, therefore, cannot be wholly separate from each other.

Conversely, fictional writing seems to be granted unlimited freedom to distort

reality. Yet, as Rushdie believes, fictional representation should not be too dissimilar

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to reality, or it might fall in the trap of whim: “Can a work of art grow into anything

of value if it has no roots in observable reality?” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

123). Consequently, both historical and fictional writings incorporate elements of

truth and untruth.

In the end, through the convergence of imitation and differentiation, parody

reveals how mirroring also reveals the existence of artifice. The doppelganger’s

existence reveals that of the real, and in turn, alongside the real sits its artificial

doppelganger. The critical difference of parody may unfetter the representation of

reality, but it also implies the inseparability between any so-called truth and fiction.

Conclusively, The Enchantress of Florence investigates the convoluted

entanglement between history and fiction. The ultimate paradox of this novel

articulates its desire for both openness and closure that results in the perpetual

reinvention of a fixed text. The interpreted history confronts the reader’s belief system

and invites the reader to participate in the hierarchical structure of ideologies. These

complex webs of intentions co-create the open-endedness and also its byproduct:

undecidability of the text. Indeterminacy may challenge the hegemonic voices, but it

also represents endless suspension and relativizing.

Lin 68

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