Salman Rushdie, Author of the Captive’s Tale · Days in a Balloon–Rushdie attempted to widen...

Salman Rushdie, Author of theCaptive’s Tale

Bruce R. BurninghamUniversity of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

This effective combination of two adjectives, one moral and the other

physical, reminded me of a line from Shakespeare which we discussed one

afternoon:

Where a malignant and turbaned Turk . . . (Jorge Luis Borges1)

[ . . . ] and ruined limbs play a central role in our saga, too. (Salman

Rushdie2)

On the night of 13 February 1989, five months after the publication ofThe Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Khomeini – as is well known – issued afatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death. This fatwa, needless to say,initiated an international diplomatic crisis between Iran and the West(especially Great Britain) as Western secular notions of ‘‘freedom ofspeech’’ came into direct conflict with Islamic Sharia laws againstblasphemy, heresy and apostasy. Members of the Iranian government, inan attempt to diffuse the growing international crisis, back-pedalledslightly by suggesting that if Rushdie were to repent he might beforgiven.3 Nevertheless, Khomeini insisted that his fatwa was irrevocable,and vigorously reiterated his call for Muslims everywhere to execute thedeath sentence as quickly as possible. When he himself died four monthslater, as David Pipes has eloquently noted, the fatwa became permanent,something ‘‘no mortal now has the power to invalidate’’.4 And eventhough the intervening years have served to officially diminish theenthusiasm with which Rushdie’s assassination is seemingly desired, thepermanence of the fatwa remains theoretically true as long as there arethose who continue to revere the irrevocable words of the AyatollahKhomeini. In fact, over the last several years one Iranian group oranother has often marked the anniversary of the fatwa with a staunchreaffirmation of its continuing juridical force.5

Within twenty-four hours of Khomeini’s edict, Rushdie had gone intohiding under British government protection, and for the next several

Salman Rushdie, Author of the Captive’s Tale

at SAGE Publications on August 1, 2016jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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years surfaced only occasionally, and then always in danger of beingambushed by some unknown assailant. During one of his brief,surreptitious excursions into the outside world – in a speech he deliveredat Columbia University on 12 December 1991, entitled ‘‘One ThousandDays in a Balloon –Rushdie attempted to widen the context of whatamounted to his virtual ‘‘house arrest’’ by tying his plight to that of other‘‘Western hostages’’ (i.e. the various U.S. and European businessmenheld captive in Lebanon, Iran and Iraq at the time), all of whom had alsobecome pawns in a geopolitical conflict that went well beyond thepublication of his controversial novel.6 He described his situation as aversion of the well-known ‘‘balloon debate’’ (in which people trapped in asinking balloon must decide whom to throw overboard) and plaintivelynoted that all of his ‘‘fellow-travellers’’ had been quietly redeemed one byone (through various diplomatic channels), leaving him all alone in thestill-sinking balloon.7

Cervantes scholars, needless to say, will hear in this tale of geopoliticalconflict – of hostages taken and redeemed, of incarcerated writers – echoesof Cervantes’s own experience as a captive over four hundred years ago.Making his way back to Spain from Italy – only a few years after hisactive participation in the Battle of Lepanto (1571), in which hepermanently lost the use of his left hand –Cervantes was ambushed bypirates in September of 1575 and spent five years as a slave in Algeriabefore finally being ransomed in September of 1580. But Cervantes’sbiography in this regard is so well-known – thanks in large measure to thefact that he made it a recurring theme of so many of his works, especiallythe autobiographical segment of Don Quixote commonly known as ‘‘TheCaptive’s Tale’’ – that it cannot help but have struck even a well-readnon-specialist like Rushdie himself as somehow uncannily familiar. Thus,it is perhaps not coincidental during this period of imposed confinement,when Rushdie began to personally identify not just with his contempor-ary ‘‘fellow-travellers’’ but perhaps with those of previous centuries aswell (most notably Cervantes), that he wrote and published his 1995novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, a work whose principle leit-motif is thenotion of captivity and which is profoundly indebted to Don Quixote.

Astute readers, of course, will already have noticed Rushdie’s generalinclination toward Cervantine prose, especially his affinity for carefullycrafted narrators. Whether functioning merely as third-person raconteursor as first-person storytellers intimately connected to the narrative itself,these narrators typically drift in and out of the text, freezing the action,commenting on its construction, debating its verisimilitude, etc. Rushdiehas long engaged Cervantes in a kind of intertextual conversation acrossthe centuries, and much of his fiction can be read – at least in this regard –as an ongoing homage to the inventor of the modern novel. Thus, The

Journal of Commonwealth Literature114



Moor’s Last Sigh, a novel peppered with numerous Cervantine allusions,represents the apex (at least so far) of Rushdie’s narratologicalengagement with Spain’s most influential author. And as with Midnight’sChildren or The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the most obvious Cervantinecomponent of this text, again, is its narrator.8 If Rushdie can be said tohave been writing versions of Don Quixote all along, this fact is madeexplicit here through the deliberate creation of Moraes Zogoiby (a.k.a.‘‘Moor’’), an Indian ‘‘cross-breed’’ from Bombay (the offspring of aChristian mother and a Jewish father) who composes his narrative whilebeing held prisoner in the fictional Spanish town of ‘‘Benengeli’’ (a placenot coincidentally situated between the villages of ‘‘Erasmo’’ and‘‘Avellaneda’’).9

More than one critic has commented on the obvious kinship between‘‘Moor’’ and Cide Hamete. Paul A. Cantor, for instance, in an articleentitled ‘‘Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use of Spanish History in TheMoor’s Last Sigh’’, examines the ways in which Rushdie incorporates thehistory of medieval Spain into his text as a way of ‘‘rethinking’’ thecultural multiplicity of contemporary India.10 At the beginning of hisessay, Cantor highlights the literary ties between Cide Hamete andMoraes Zogoiby and notes that Don Quixote serves as a ‘‘precursor’’ toThe Moor’s Last Sigh.11 From this point of departure he traces what hecalls the ‘‘Islamic expansionism’’ of the seventh through the fourteenthcenturies12 – an expansionism that not only resulted in the establishmentof ‘‘al-Andalus’’ on the Iberian peninsula, but also produced an Indiathat was ‘‘always already invaded’’ long before the arrival of either thePortuguese or the British13 – and he discusses the Reconquista (theChristian [principally Castilian] military campaign to ‘‘take back’’ thepeninsula) and comments on the co-existence of Christians, Jews andMuslims in medieval Iberia. Cantor explains the significance of thework’s title for readers perhaps unaware of the events surrounding thefall of Granada on 2 January 1492 –when Boabdil, the last ‘‘Moorishmonarch’’ of the Iberian peninsula, surrendered the keys to his belovedAlhambra to the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, with anotoriously heavy sigh – and argues that Rushdie’s incorporation ofthis segment of Spanish history into his novel ‘‘places him squarely in thecamp of the contemporary ideology of multiculturalism [through whichhe] condemns efforts to impose a uniform culture on a nation andcelebrates instead cultural hybridity’’.14 Later, however, he problematizesthis assertion by exploring Rushdie’s own contrastive vision of acontemporary multicultural Spain dominated by foreign tourists andmultinational corporations like Gucci, Hermes, etc., a commercialmulticulturalism which in turn is opposed in places like India by anincreasingly vociferant religious fundamentalism. Says Cantor: ‘‘I began

Salman Rushdie, Author of the Captive’s Tale 115



by arguing that Rushdie offers multiculturalism as the antidote toreligious conflict, but now I am saying that Rushdie views religiousconflict as marking the inevitable limit to the success of culturalhybridity’’.15

Stephen Henighan, for his part, in an article entitled ‘‘Coming toBenengeli: The Genesis of Salman Rushdie’s Rewriting of Juan Rulfo inThe Moor’s Last Sigh’’, also examines the connection between Hispanicculture and Rushdie’s novel.16 But unlike Cantor, Henighan does notfocus so much on historical and political questions as he does on theliterary intertextualities between Rushdie’s work and that of otherwriters, specifically the novelists of the Latin American ‘‘boom’’. Thus,while Henighan clearly alludes to Cervantes in his title and explicitly citesDon Quixote in his conclusion, he is much more interested in exploringthe influence of such figures as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel GarcıaMarquez, Carlos Fuentes, and (obviously) Juan Rulfo on Rushdie’swork. He does not seem interested in teasing out the multiple Cervantineallusions that pervade the text. In this way, then, Henighan tracesRushdie’s growing intellectual engagement with Latin American fiction,and through a close comparative analysis he documents Rushdie’sliterary debt in both Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh tosuch works as One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Death of Artemio Cruzand Terra Nostra.17

‘‘Coming to Benengeli’’ culminates, as its title implies, with a closereading of Part Four of The Moor’s Last Sigh (itself entitled, ‘‘TheMoor’s Last Sigh’’) in which Moraes travels to Benengeli on a quest torecover his lost heritage: several paintings by his famous mother, therenowned artist, Aurora Zogoiby, which have been stolen from theIndian national gallery and clandestinely imported into Spain by VascoMiranda, himself another famous artist (and former family friend) whonow lives in a kitschy re-creation of the Alhambra. Henighanpersuasively argues that this journey to Benengeli, in which Moraesencounters a number of phantasmagorical figures before ultimatelydying, is modelled on Juan Preciado’s journey to Comala in PedroParamo, in which the protagonist also goes in search of his past and alsodies in the process. Henighan ends his analysis by noting the severalexplicit references Rushdie also makes toward Don Quixote (especiallywith regard to Cide Hamete) and argues that through these allusionsRushdie ‘‘pushes his engagement with the Hispanic tradition back to itsfoundations’’.18

Thus, while both Cantor and Henighan acknowledge Rushdie’sCervantine borrowings, their interest in Cide Hamete’s ghostly presencein the text remains limited to his function both as a figure of the cultural,linguistic, and religious hybridity of medieval Spain, and as an emblem of




what Henighan calls the ‘‘rifts’’ that have plagued Spanish society sincebefore the Renaissance.19 For them, Moraes represents the key to anallegory that serves as both the point of departure and the point of arrivalfor Rushdie’s exploration of the realities of postcolonial India, whatCantor calls ‘‘the full complexity of the problem of multiculturalism’’.20

In essence, both view Rushdie’s Cervantine allusions in The Moor’s LastSigh strictly within the global context of colonial repression andpostcolonial resistance in which the ‘‘history’’ that matters most is thatof the Da Gama/Zogoiby dynasty, a dynasty whose ‘‘family’’ history –like that of the Buendias and Macondo in One Hundred Years ofSolitude – is inseparable from that of India itself. And given the family’sorigins ‘‘beneath [Boabdil’s] roof, and then between his sheets’’ (p.82),Moraes’s narration of this tale – along with his return to Granada at theend – bring both the dynastic history and the colonial history to a full-circle conclusion.

Yet, despite Cantor’s and Henighan’s appreciable insights intoRushdie’s intellectual engagement with both Spain and Latin America,their broad, historical approaches do not represent the only way ofreading the Cervantine intertextualities embedded in The Moor’s LastSigh. Moraes’s autobiographical narration, which he writes while beingheld prisoner in Benengeli, can be read at the same time on a much moreintimate level. That is, woven into the fabric of the interrelated dynastichistory of the Da Gama/Zogoiby families and the colonial andpostcolonial histories of the Iberian peninsula and the Indian subconti-nent is an exploration of a much more personal – although no lessglobal – tale, one that re-inscribes Rushdie’s own experience as a ‘‘captivewriter’’ in the late twentieth century within a fictional context Cervanteshimself might also have found uncannily familiar. In other words, like‘‘The Captive’s Tale’’ itself, the novel occupies – and, indeed, constitu-tes – an intermediate discursive space, what Rushdie has called a ‘‘middleground’’,21 where the larger histories (both political and literary) of Spainand India intersect with the personal histories (again, both political andliterary) of Cervantes and Rushdie themselves. In this regard, it functionsas a brilliant performance of textual hybridity itself, a discursive exampleof what Homi Bhabha has characterized as ‘‘in-betweenness’’.22

While various critics have noted the relationship between ‘‘Moor’’ and‘‘Cide Hamete’’, none (to my knowledge) has noted Moraes Zogoiby’suncanny resemblance to both Don Quixote and Cervantes himself. Earlyin the novel, when Moraes’s narrative briefly flashes forward to the actualmoment of textual creation (as opposed to the more common moments ofmemorial reconstruction), Rushdie allows us a fleeting glimpse of thisexplicitly Cervantine narrator who contemplates his own witheringphysiognomy:




The mirrors of Benengeli reflect an exhausted gent with hair as white, as

thin, as serpentine as his great-grandmother Epifania’s long-gone

chevelure. His gaunt face, and in his elongated body no more than a

memory of an old, slow grace of movement. The aquiline profile is now

merely beaky, and the womanly full lips have thinned, like the dwindling

corona of hair. [ . . . ] Chicken-necked and pigeon-chested, this bony, dusty

old-timer still manages an admirable erectness of bearing [ . . . ]; but if you

could see him, and had to guess his age, you’d say he was fit for rocking-

chairs, soft food and rolled trousers, you’d put him out to pasture like an

old horse, or – if by chance you were not in India – you might pack him off

to a retirement home. Seventy-two years old, you’d say, with a deformed

right hand like a club. (pp.145–6)

Spotting Don Quixote in this description is fairly easy, as is catching thebrief, secondary appearance of Rocinante in the horse put out to pasture.But linking this passage with Don Quixote’s creator is fraught with a bitmore difficulty. First, such a linkage necessarily implies an autobio-graphical connection between Moraes and Rushdie similar to thatbetween Ruy Perez de Viedma (the ‘‘Captive’’ of Don Quixote) andCervantes. Rushdie, however, explicitly rejected this kind of linkageduring an interview in which he insisted ‘‘[Moor] ain’t me’’ just as‘‘Bellow is not Herzog’’.23 To this objection we can only respond thatCervantes himself insisted to the end that Don Quixote was nothing morethan a burlesque of the chivalric novel, a claim most readers over the lastfour hundred years have found somewhat untenable. Likewise, whileBellow may not be Herzog, Ruy Perez de Viedma both is and is notCervantes; he too functions as a ‘‘half-and-halfer’’24 by occupying HomiBhabha’s space in-between. Secondly, however, and setting asideRushdie’s authorial disclaimers, while Moraes’s deformed right handis – to say the very least – highly suggestive of Cervantes’s famousdisability, the fact remains that Moraes’s debilitation is a birth defectrather than a war wound, and –moreover – is conspicuously located onthe wrong side of his body. To this caveat we would point out that in arhetorical move highly reminiscent of Velasquez – and Rushdie mentionsthe sight lines of Las Meninas at least once in the text (p.246) –what hehas described above is a mirror image, so that what we actually see as welook at Moraes’s reflection through his own eyes is a quixotic figure withan apparently lame left hand, thus making Moraes an inverted, baroquereflection of ‘‘el manco de Lepanto’’ (‘‘the one-handed [hero] ofLepanto’’), as he is commonly know throughout the Spanish-speakingworld.

Now, while there is ample circumstantial evidence to see a bit ofRushdie in Moraes, there is no reason to insist that this is purely a one-to-one correspondence; Rushdie is far too fine a writer to have created such




a ham-fisted self-allusion. As a matter of fact, in the previously citedinterview, in response to a question about his authorial presence in thetext, Rushdie indicated that he actually felt a much greater personalaffinity toward Moraes’s mother, Aurora, since ‘‘the kind of painter sheis is a little bit the kind of writer I would like to be’’.25 Appropriately,then, painting becomes a metaphor for narrative throughout the text, andMoraes’s several lengthy commentaries on art – especially his mother’swork – can be taken as a kind of extended ars poetica of the novel itself,similar to remarks made by the canon at the end of Part I of Don Quixote,whose commentaries on the chivalric novel can be read as an ars poeticaof the very text in which he appears.26

Significantly, Aurora’s career begins precisely during a moment ofcaptivity. Having been locked in her bedroom for a week by her father (asa punishment for pilfering a number of household items), Aurora utilizesthe period of her ‘‘house arrest’’ as the ‘‘true moment of her coming-of-age’’, and thus fills the walls of her room with images depicting both theancient and modern history of India, a panorama in which history,family, politics, and fantasy all converge in a sweeping collage (pp.58–9).This narrative tendency – the very essence of Rushdie’s novel itself –withits proclivity toward what Moraes calls a ‘‘thousand-and-one anecdotes’’(p.102), will mark Aurora’s work throughout the course of her career,even as her artistic technique becomes more and more abstract over time.And nowhere is this better represented than in the series of so-called‘‘Moor paintings’’ – begun in 1957 and culminating with her ‘‘last,unfinished, unsigned masterpiece, The Moor’s Last Sigh’’ (p.218) – inwhich she creates a pastiche (based on Boabdil’s famous capitulation)that chronicles at one and the same time the contemporary history ofIndia and that of her immediate family (pp.203–4). And as withRushdie’s own novel, these paintings function –Moraes explains – as an‘‘attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation’’ in whichAurora ‘‘was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India’’ (p.227).

But as ‘‘trans-historical’’ as this series of paintings might be, theseworks exhibit a distinct autobiographical quality as well, since Moraesserves both as physical and metaphorical model for Boabdil:

As the Moor pictures moved further down this fabulist road, it became

plain that I barely needed to pose for my mother any more; but she wanted

me there, she said she needed me, she called me her lucky talis-moor. And I

was happy to be there, because the story unfolding on her canvases seemed

more like my autobiography than the real story of my life. (p.227; italics in

original)

And as the paintings become more and more intimately biographical,they become more and more fragmented:




The Moor was an abstract figure now, a pattern of black and white diamonds

covering him from head to foot. The mother, Ayxa, was black; and the lover,

Chimene, was brilliant white. [ . . . ] He was the living proof of the possibility

of the union of opposites. But Ayxa the Black pulled one way, and Chimene

the White, the other. They began to tear him in half. Black diamonds, white

diamonds fell from the gash, like teardrops. (p.259; italics in original)

In the light of the many references to ‘‘Mother India’’ that occurthroughout the novel, it is not difficult to read this family romance, inwhich a possessive mother and a (frankly) dangerous beloved fight overthe affections of a protagonist who is literally torn apart by the conflict,as an allegory of Rushdie’s sense of East/West alienation, a conflict hehimself characterized in his ‘‘Balloon’’ speech as ‘‘the warring halves ofthe world, which were also the warring halves of my soul’’.27 Thispsychological interpretation becomes even more attractive when weremember, as Timothy Weiss has noted, that the name ‘‘Aurora’’ alludesto a Roman goddess, while the name ‘‘Uma Sarasvati’’ (Moraes’s lover)derives from two distinct Hindu goddesses.28 Moreover, Uma herself hasbeen transformed by Aurora in the above-mentioned painting into a kindof postmodern pastiche that erases any clear boundaries between Indian,Spanish, French and American cultures: ‘‘Uma, fictionalised, Hispani-cised as this ‘Chimene’, Uma incorporating aspects of Sophia Loren in ElCid, pinched from the story of Rodrigo de Vivar and introduced withoutexplanation into the hybrid universe of the Moor’’ (p.247). Still, I am lessinterested here with the ways in which Rushdie’s own psychologicalautobiography seeps into the book than I am with what this particularpassage says about his narrative technique. For the same proclivitiestoward abstraction and fragmentation that Moraes sees in his mother’spaintings are just as evident in Rushdie’s text. And many of thesenarrative shards are inextricably linked to his intimate dialogue withCervantes.

One of the more notable aspects of Rushdie’s work is his prolifictendency toward playful and complex word games, especially bilingualpuns. In this respect, The Moor’s Last Sigh does not differ from his otherworks. Rushdie explicitly justifies this punning in his explanation of thememorable nickname of Lambajan Chandiwala, the Da Gama/Zogoiby’sone-legged household servant: ‘‘In those days many more people wouldhave understood the inter-lingual joke: lamba, long; jan, sounds likeJohn, chandi, silver. Long John Silverfellow [ . . . ]’’ (p.126). And in fact,Rushdie uses the very nicknames of the four Zogoiby children as anextended set-up to a punch-line that he seems to insert solely for thepleasure of telling it. Shortly after the birth of their first daughter,Christina, Moraes’s parents shorten her name to simply ‘‘Ina’’; likewisehis next sister, Inamorata, becomes ‘‘Minnie’’; and his third sister,




Philomina, becomes ‘‘Mynah’’. Thus, when Moraes, the youngest andonly male in the family, comes along, acquiring his own nickname, thepun is complete: ‘‘Ina, Minnie, Mynah, and at last Moor. That’s me: theend of the line’’ (pp.142–3). (This, of course, is a sophisticated pun in itsown right since ‘‘Moor’’ represents both the ‘‘end’’ of the poetic line andthe genetic ‘‘end’’ of his family line, given that he dies without an heir.)

In similar fashion, Rushdie peppers his text with a variety ofoffhanded Cervantine puns and allusions that serve as grace notes tothe work’s more prominent themes. Astute readers, for instance, will pickup on this trend almost immediately when Moraes characterizes hisfamily narrative as ‘‘the story of our comings-together, tearings-apart,our rises, falls, our tiltoings up and down’’ (p.12; original emphasis).Shortly thereafter, he obliquely alludes to Cervantes’s short story, ‘‘TheGlass Graduate’’, in a passage that reads: ‘‘’So Abie,’ [Flora Zogoiby]said slowly, not looking directly at him in case she found she could seethrough him, which would prove that she had finally cracked into littlepieces’’ (p.109). Monipodio, the head of a Sevillian crime syndicate inanother short story, ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’’ – and whose name isalmost an ‘‘inter-lingual’’ joke by itself – also makes an extendedappearance in the guise of the peg-legged Lambajan Chandiwala, a.k.a.Long John Silverfellow, the ‘‘private pirate’’ (p.126) whom Moraes refersto as his ‘‘Beloved monopod guardian’’ (p.126).29

These linguistic and narrative grace notes serve two functions withinthe text. First, they ornament the principle themes of the work: captivityand narrativity. Second, Rushdie’s seemingly throw-away allusions alsoserve as narrative signposts, alerting the reader to the more substantivepathways he has constructed within the book, pathways that trace thedistribution of the various Cervantine fragments he has scatteredthroughout the novel. In this regard, there are, in fact, two distinct‘‘Don Quixote’’ lines within the text – one ‘‘positive’’ and one ‘‘nega-tive’’ – lines that form an ‘‘arabesque’’ sub-exploration of the relationshipbetween reading and madness. (Not coincidentally, when Moraes finallyarrives in Benengeli, one of the first things he sees is a sign hanging abovethe door to a school which reads ‘‘Lectura – locura’’ [p.386]).

On the one hand, for instance, Moraes’s family seems to have a deepstreak of ‘‘quixotism’’ running through its genealogy, and this‘‘quixotism’’ manifests itself as an idealism that stems in large partfrom too much reading. Rushdie explicitly ties Francisco da Gama, forinstance, Moraes’s maternal great-grandfather, to Cervantes’s nowarchetypal protagonist (just as he tied Moraes to Cervantes’s nowarchetypal narrator) when he describes him as ‘‘hero material from theday he was born, destined for questions and quests, as ill-at-ease withdomesticity as Quixote’’ (p.17). Francisco’s wanderlust and idealism




combine to lead him out into the greater world on a mission to fundorphanages and free health clinics, build schools and research institutes,and even sponsor such humanistic endeavours as an annual contest oforal storytellers. His political activism, however, eventually lands him inprison (again, the question of captivity) where he is transformed, underthe enormous pressure, into a total quixotic buffoon: ‘‘Nobody everworked out where, in what reject-goods discount-store of the mind,Great-Grandfather Francisco got hold of the scientific theory that turnedhim from emerging hero into national laughing-stock’’ (pp.19–20). Fromhis prison cell he writes and publishes a convoluted paper entitled‘‘Towards a Provisional Theory of the Transformational Fields ofConscience’’, in which he proposes the existence of global networks of‘‘spiritual energy’’ that function as ‘‘nothing less than the repositories ofthe memory – both practical and moral – of the human species’’ (p.20).This quest for unification contrasts markedly with Francisco’s previousattitudes to global culture. Earlier in his life he had attempted to separatehis colonial hybrid world (at least architecturally) by constructingseparate ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ houses (with all that those adjectives imply)on a single piece of property, and then alternatively inhabiting eachedifice during brief intervals. Now imprisoned, he seeks to unify all ofhumanity through his writing. The man who once considered himself a‘‘disciple of Bertrand Russell’’ (p.17) has now apparently read too much‘‘Theosophy’’ and has taken too seriously the Mahatma Gandhi’s‘‘insistence on the oneness of all India’s widely differing millions’’ (p.20).The only ‘‘oneness’’ he manages to provoke with his treatise, however, isa negative reaction so universal that he eventually sinks ‘‘intointroversion and despondency’’ (p.22) before finally swimming out tosea to his death during a rainstorm.

Francisco passes this innocuous and ineffective ‘‘quixotism’’ onto hissons, Camoens and Aires, who fiercely oppose each other in the debateson history, empire and nationalism on the Indian sub-continent.Camoens literally follows in his father’s footsteps when he breaks intothe ‘‘West’’ house’s library and begins to voraciously ‘‘devour the books’’(p.24). Yet, as with his father before him, this ‘‘Western education’’eventually leads to a quixotic activism that also leads to his owndisillusionment and downfall. He embraces Marxism and attempts tobuild a genuine alliance between India and the Soviet Union, but when avisiting troupe of ‘‘Lenin-thesps’’ (p.29) – i.e. Lenin impersonators whotour the world re-enacting the greatness of the Russian revolution in atype of socialist ‘‘auto-sacramental’’ – prove to be every bit as racist as theBritish, Camoens is deeply disillusioned and becomes instead a staunchNationalist, ironically, though, one with a ‘‘fierce love of Englishliterature’’ (p.32) and an ‘‘equally fierce determination that the British




imperium must end’’ (p.33). In a way, Camoens –whose nationalismattempts to nullify the colonial invasion so elegantly extolled by hisnamesake, the author of Os Lusıadas30 – can be read here as a figure ofthe ‘‘Third World’’ as that Cold War term was originally understoodbefore it achieved its postcolonial significance as an adjective describingthe subaltern peoples of developing countries: Camoens remains defiantly‘‘non-aligned’’ with either the capitalist ‘‘first world’’ or the socialist‘‘second world’’, and his personal disillusionment functions in the text asa symbol of the collective frustration of the postcolonial world withinsuch a rigidly binary international system.

Aires da Gama, for his part, avoids activism entirely and retreatsinstead into a kind of cocoon of nineteenth-century Anglophilia. Thus,when independence comes to India, when he is forced to give up ‘‘hissecret fantasy that the Europeans might one day return to the MalabarCoast’’, he takes to wearing spats and a monocle and enters into areclusive retirement in which he devotes himself to a complete reading ofthe English canon, ‘‘consoling himself with the best of the old world forthe distasteful mutabilities of history’’ (p.199). It is not difficult, ofcourse, to detect in this rhetorical flourish the ghost of Matthew Arnoldwho functions as a kind of Amadıs de Gaula for this new Don Quixoteclad in both the armour and the philosophy of a bygone age. But Aires’stwentieth-century escape into an idealized nineteenth-century past turnsout to be both as impossible as Alonso Quijano’s own epochal retreat andas frustrated as Camoens’s own political ‘‘non-alignment’’ with thebipolarities of the twentieth century.

Camoens and Aires, of course, represent fairly harmless quixoticfigures; they are eccentric but not dangerous. They are reflected, however,in Rushdie’s Cervantine mirror by two darkly negatively characters. Thefirst of these is Raman Fielding (a.k.a. Mainduck), the overtly Hitlerian‘‘failed artist’’ and dictatorial politico who rises to power by invoking anIndian Golden Age, ‘‘when good Hindu men and women could roamfree’’ (p.299).31 Fielding is a politically active Quixote figure. UnlikeCamoens, however, he exists as a kind of study in the negative power ofunbridled idealism, especially when this is reduced to an opportunisticfanaticism. Fielding ultimately realizes the very dangerous potential thatalways lies just below the surface of Don Quixote’s own guileless desire torestore a long-lost golden age. For despite his many virtues, Don Quixoteis at base a single-minded, quasi-religious fanatic (as the episode with theJewish silk merchants makes fairly clear32) whose often belligerent aimsare limited only by his advanced age and by the fact that, once in thecompany of Sancho, the priest, the barber, Dorotea et al., he issurrounded by people who tend to exert a calming influence. Fielding,however, is much younger, much stronger, and is accompanied by no




such cadre of wise counsellors. Except during a brief period when Moraeshimself plays thug-like Sancho to Fielding’s violent Quixote, Fieldingsurrounds himself with like-minded fanatics.33 And the only thing thatultimately prevents his success (or so we think) is that his Sanchoeventually turns on him. If, as Rushdie has said, the novel is a critique ofthe dangers of religious fundamentalism in a pluralistic society, thenFielding is the maximum symbol of this danger in the world.34

The second, and probably most important dangerously quixotic figureof the novel is Vasco Miranda, a self-invented ‘‘madman’’ (p.165) – and,again, frustrated artist –who provides the mirror image to Aires daGama. For where Aires retreats from the realities of postcolonial Indiainto the imaginative ‘‘British’’ universe of his father’s colonial library,Vasco greets Indian independence with an equally ‘‘literary’’ reaction. Atthe stroke of midnight on 15 April 1947, he rises and delivers thefollowing accusatory toast at a party thrown by Aurora Zogoiby:

‘‘What are you all so pleased about?’’ he shouted, swaying. ‘‘This isn’t

your night. [ . . . ] Don’t you get it? Bunch of English-medium misfits, the

lot of you. Minority group members. Square-peg freaks. You don’t belong

here. Country’s as alien to you as if you were what’s-the-word lunatics.

Moon-men. You read the wrong books, get on the wrong side in every

argument, think the wrong thoughts. (pp.165–6; italics in original)

Declaring himself henceforth ‘‘Portuguese’’ (p.167) – both due to anddespite the fact that he is from the state of Goa –Vasco eventually makeshis way back to the Iberian peninsula and retreats, not into anAnglocentric library, but into a labyrinthine simulacrum of the mightyAlhambra in which he attempts to recreate ‘‘the fabulous multiple cultureof ancient al-Andalus’’ (p.398). And as he grows ever more imbalanced,he abandons even this new ‘‘Portuguese’’ identity – like Aires whoforsakes all vestiges of his Indian self, assuming instead the costume of aproper English gentleman – and begins to dress up like ‘‘an old-timeSultan’’ (p.398), wearing ‘‘baggy pantaloons and embroidered waistcoat,worn open over a ballooning collarless shirt’’ (p.410). He even enjoys akind of ‘‘dulcinated’’ harem in the form of the so-called Larios ‘‘sisters’’,Renegada and Felicitas, whose surname Moraes speculates mightactually be ‘‘Lorenco’’ or ‘‘del Toboso’’ (p.417), and who turn out, inthe end, to be lovers rather than siblings.35

It is here in the ‘‘Little Alhambra’’ that the various narrative skeins ofthe novel – its running puns, its leit-motifs, its splintered allegories – allconverge. Vasco Miranda’s ‘‘Mooristan’’ is precisely the place where‘‘worlds collide’’ (p.408): East and West, past and present, fact andfiction. It is the site where the novel’s primary themes of captivity andnarrativity come to fruition, as Moraes himself explicitly notes when he




ties himself to the world’s most famous captive storyteller: ‘‘[VascoMiranda] had made a Scheherezade of me. As long as my tale held hisinterest he would let me live’’ (p.421). In fact, dressed up here as ‘‘TheGreat Turk’’, Vasco functions as a double parody that once againconnects Rushdie with Cervantes. On the one hand, he can be read as amocking symbol of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a kind of megalomaniacal‘‘sultan’’ who had effectively imprisoned Rushdie (ironically in order topunish him for his stories rather than impel a command performance) aspart of a colossal plan to re-establish a long-lost world. On the otherhand, Vasco can be seen here as a kind of postmodern ‘‘renegade’’ (in thiscase, a ‘‘Portuguese’’ pilgrim who renounces his Christian identity inorder to transform himself into a medieval Iberian Muslim, if only as ahollow cultural sign). He can be read as a burlesque echo perhaps ofArnaute Mami, the renegade captain (of Greek origin) who capturedCervantes in 1575 and who thus inspired, however indirectly, ‘‘TheCaptive’s Tale’’ itself.

But the Little Alhambra is also the place where one reality overlaysanother: Benengeli is also what Moraes calls ‘‘Palimpstine’’ (p.409). Andthus, it is here that Rushdie’s Cervantine allusions not only converge, butactually expand in order to envelope and include another famouslyCervantine writer, specifically Jorge Luis Borges. Moraes Zogoiby is notthe only prisoner held captive in the Little Alhambra. Vasco Miranda hasalso taken a ‘‘second hostage’’ (p.419) in the person of a Japanese-bornart restorer named Aoi Ue whom he has forcibly enlisted to liberate fromits ‘‘long imprisonment’’ (p.420) The Moor’s Last Sigh, Aurora’s originalmasterpiece that now lies hidden beneath Vasco Miranda’s own paintedversion of this same historical scene, which, not coincidentally, also bearsthe title The Moor’s Last Sigh. Aoi’s East Asian origins and herultimately violent demise are significant, and not just because she can beread perhaps as a figure of the real-life Japanese translator of The SatanicVerses who was killed in 1991 by militants enforcing the fatwa. Moraesspeculates in his narration – a narration that Aoi pointedly reads even asit is being written – that ‘‘in another life, down a fork in the road’’ (p.428)the ‘‘story in which she was so unfairly trapped’’ (p.427) might haveturned out differently. Astute readers will clearly discern in this phrasingthe discursive echoes of Borges’s ‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths’’, a storyin which East also fatally meets West and in which imperial struggles andfamily histories play a significant role.36 Rushdie’s allusion to this story isimportant precisely through the notion of palimpsests. ‘‘The Garden ofForking Paths’’ is nothing, of course, if not the story of multiplerealities –multiple narratives – overwriting each other in a kind of mise-en-abıme. The Moor’s Last Sigh, then, functions as a kind of‘‘performance’’ of Borges’s implied forking narratives. It contains




multiple ‘‘Moors’’ and multiple ‘‘Moor’s Last Sighs’’. The ‘‘Moors’’include Boabdil (the historical figure), Boabdil (the protagonist ofAurora’s painting), Boabdil (the protagonist of Vasco Miranda’spainting), Cide Hamete, Clayton Moore (the actor who originally playedthe Lone Ranger on TV and whom Moraes invokes in a shrewd West/East parody of the Cowboys-and-Indians discourse of AmericanWesterns [p.413]), Mrs. Moore from E. M. Forster’s novel, A Passageto India (a character who, at the very least, hovers over Rushdie’s textever so obliquely through the lingering echoes associated with the nameFielding), and finally, Moraes Zogoiby himself. The ‘‘Moor’s Last Sighs’’include Rushdie’s novel as a whole, his final section of the same title,Boabdil’s historical lament, the Spanish ballad this lament inspired (a textexplicitly absent for most readers, though inevitably present for thosefamiliar with the Hispanic literary tradition), Aurora’s painting based onthis story, Vasco Miranda’s own artistic rendering painted over Aurora’searlier work, and finally, Moraes’s tale itself, a narration literally utteredwith his dying breath. And this final ‘‘Moor’s Last Sigh’’ – that is,Moraes’s blood-stained manuscript which both begins and ends inBenengeli, and in which at least three characters read along as their ownhistories are recounted – folds back on itself in such a way as to create thekind of Cervantine circularity Garcıa Marquez constructs at the end ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude and which Borges himself provocativelyposits in ‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths’’:

I recalled, too, the night in the middle of The Thousand and One Nights

when Queen Scheherezade, through a magical mistake on the part of her

copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One Nights, with the

risk of again arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and thus on

to infinity.37

Yet Rushdie is no distracted copyist. Nothing would be better, of course,for Scheherezade – at least from her own perspective – than to be trappedin an infinite narrative loop that forever deferred the threat of imminentdeath. For although she does eventually escape the fate suffered by herown ‘‘fellow-travellers’’, this escape is by no means assured until the veryend when the Sultan abrogates his own imposed death sentence.Likewise, nothing could be better for Moraes Zogoiby – a narratorgenetically cursed by an accelerated aging that threatens to kill him longbefore his time – than to exist within a narrative that is not only circular(and hence temporally infinite), but in which his own subjectivity ismirrored through a series of other ‘‘moors’’, all of whom existsimultaneously both inside and outside a narrative loop that is itselfpart of an interlocking mise-en-abıme in which one ‘‘Moor’s Last Sigh’’reflects another and another and another. And for this reason it is




significant that, although Moraes claims to sit down and write the end ofhis story (an ending that more or less appears as the novel’s first chapter),the text itself denies us both that very ending and Moraes’s imminentdemise. Instead, the final two pages of the book exist as a kind of oralepilogue –Moraes’s literal ‘‘last sigh’’ uttered to the four winds – in whichhis death is (Borges-like) ultimately deferred: ‘‘[ . . . ] I’ll lay me down uponthis graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters R I P, and close myeyes, according to our family’s old practice of falling asleep in times oftrouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time’’(pp.433–4; original emphasis). And while Moraes slumbers, waiting for abetter fork in the temporal path, he is content to let his tale replay itselfover and over again in a verbatim loop, somewhat like an old 8-tracktape.

But ‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths’’ is not the only Borges text thatprofoundly informs Rushdie’s novel, especially with regard to DonQuixote and the question of palimpsests. Borges, of course, wrote (or, atleast, proposed) his own version of Cervantes’s novel in ‘‘Pierre Menard,Author of the Quixote’’, a text which functions not only as a kind of ‘‘hallof mirrors’’ also related to Las Meninas,38 but which is explicitly devotedto the idea of exploring the ultimate narrative palimpsest, for it recreatesCervantes’s novel ‘‘word for word and line for line’’.39 Yet, PierreMenard’s Don Quixote, as we know, is an incomplete text since it consistsmerely of three ‘‘isolated’’ segments: the ninth and thirty-eighth chaptersof Part I and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter (Borges’s narratordoes not stipulate from which part). Part I, Chapter IX, of course,represents the precise moment in the text where Cervantes first introducesCide Hamete Benengeli; Chapter XXXVIII consists of Don Quixote’sdisquisition on the relative merits of arms and letters, a segment thatfunctions as a prologue to ‘‘The Captive’s Tale’’ itself; and the enigmaticChapter XXII represents either the very chapter in Part I where we firstmeet Gines de Pasamonte (yet another captive narrator who manages toescape from his own constrictive autobiography in order to reappear lateron, down another narrative path) or the chapter in Part II where DonQuixote descends into Montesinos’s cave and falls asleep only to have hisvision of a corrupted ideal partially confirmed for him a short time laterby Gines de Pasamonte in his new role as Maese Pedro, the puppeteer.

That Menard would succeed in recreating these three chapters (out ofthe 126 written by Cervantes) is curious, and a number of scholars haveattempted to explain this particular collection of episodes.40 But whatevernexus may exist in Menard’s (or Borges’s) imagination, Rushdie hasclearly intuited a new interrelationship between these narrative frag-ments. Indeed, The Moor’s Last Sigh can be read as a version of DonQuixote. But it is not a reconstruction of Cervantes’s Don Quixote;




rather, it is a rewriting of Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote in whichCervantes, Cide Hamete, Don Quixote, Ruy Perez de Viedma and Ginesde Pasamonte all merge into a single captive narrator who falls asleep atthe end, hoping to reappear in a better story the second time around;hoping in fact – even if this second tale turns out to be a verbatimpalimpsest of the first – that it will at least be, as Borges himself says,‘‘infinitely richer’’.41 But where Pierre Menard’s text exists as anabbreviated palimpsest, erasing 123 other Cervantine chapters, Rushdie’sfunctions as a supplemental one that connects Menard’s three chapterstogether precisely by filling in the gaps between them. And the centre ofthis new text – like Menard’s itself – is a debate about arms and letters,one Rushdie allegorizes by making it both literal and symbolic at one andthe same time.

As we have already noted, Moraes’s deformed right hand inverselymirrors Cervantes’s left one. The irony of this deformity, as Moraeshimself points out, is that he remains nonetheless ‘‘right-handed’’, whichmeans that he must learn to do everything (including and especially write)with his still functional left hand, despite the difficulties involved in suchan endeavour: ‘‘It was as hard for me to learn to write with my left handas it would be for any righty in the world. When I was ten, and lookedtwenty, my handwriting was no better than a toddler’s early scrawls.This, too, I overcame.’’ (p.153). But along the way, Moraes discovers thathis club-like right hand is not entirely useless either, and he learns to usehis very potent (indeed, lethal) arm in the boxing ring, becoming aformidable opponent. Thus, for a narrator whose tale ultimately forceshim to become a writer, this ‘‘handicap’’ is doubly significant: Moraes isthe literal embodiment of ‘‘arms’’ on the one hand and ‘‘letters’’ on theother. And the debate between the two occurs within the third ofRushdie’s four structural divisions – tellingly entitled ‘‘Bombay Cen-tral’’ – and plays itself out in two decisive moments.

At the end of Part Two, Moraes is arrested on what amounts totrumped-up murder charges (after Uma has accidentally poisoned herselfin trying to kill him) and he spends much of the first chapter of ‘‘BombayCentral’’ locked in solitary confinement within a roach-infested jail cell sohorrific that it evokes Dante, Kafka and Orwell simultaneously. Yet, hedoes not languish there for long, before unexpectedly finding himself‘‘raised from the dead’’ (p.294) by Raman Fielding who offers him hisfreedom in exchange for his services as a henchman. And as with VascoMiranda’s later non-choice of either writing or dying, Fielding alsomakes him choose between his left hand (i.e., the lettered one) and hisright hand (i.e., the armed one). For a protagonist who describes hisdeformity with yet another pun (‘‘life had dealt me a bad hand’’ [p.153]),the decision imposed on him by Fielding carries a profound rhetorical




resonance: Fielding literally forces Moraes’s hand: ‘‘My zombie, myhammer: are you for us or against us, will you be righteous or will you belefteous?’’ (p.295). Given no real choice, of course, Moraes initiallyfollows Don Quixote’s advice and chooses the soldier’s life. He becomesthe ‘‘righteous’’ enforcer of Fielding’s fanatical vision; he becomesFielding’s ‘‘right-hand-man’’. But even the manual labour associatedwith this nefarious vocation provides an outlet for Moraes’s writerlytendencies: ‘‘Did I not tell you with what difficulty I had learned left-handedness, how unnaturally it came to me? Very well: but now I couldbe right-handed at last, in my new life of action I could remove mydoughty hammer from my pocket and set it free to write the story of mylife’’ (p.305).

Over the course of Part Three, however, Moraes comes to regret thisdefence of arms –what he calls his ‘‘pulverising Hammer period’’(p.364) – precisely because it forces him to undergo a kind of Fielding-esque metamorphosis that essentially transforms him from Sancho intoSanson Carrasco (Don Quixote’s nemesis in Part II, who appears first asthe ‘‘Knight of the Mirrors’’ and later as the ‘‘Knight of the WhiteMoon’’). Moraes becomes a mirror image of his crazed employer: ‘‘So Ihad become a murdering fanatic, too’’ (p.365). And this realization leadshim –Carrasco-like – into a decisive final battle with Fielding. Yet whenhe confronts his reflective enemy, on the pretence of delivering a secretmessage, and determined to take his life, despite all of Fielding’selaborate precautions, circumstance (or better yet, Fielding) again forcesMoraes’s hand one last time:

The green frog-phone stared up at me from his desk. God, I hated that

phone. I bent towards Mainduck; who flung out his left hand, at high

speed, caught me by the hair at the nape of my neck, and jammed my

mouth into the left side of his head. Off-balance for a moment, I realised

with some horror that my right hand, my only weapon, could no longer

reach the target. But as I fell against the edge of the desk, my left hand –

that same left hand which I had had to force myself, all my life, and

against my nature, to learn how to use – collided, by chance, with the

telephone.

‘‘The message is from my mother,’’ I whispered, and smashed the

green frog into his face. He made no sound. His fingers released my hair,

but the frog-phone kept wanting to kiss him, so I kissed him with it, as

hard as I could, then harder, and harder still, until the plastic splintered

and the instrument began to come apart in my hand. (p.367)

Moraes does in fact succeed in killing Fielding here, and thus at firstglance it would seem he has maintained a violent defence of arms. Butjust as his right hand earlier allowed him to ‘‘write the story of his life’’,the particular way in which he annihilates his enemy is significant,




especially at the level of metaphor. Moraes’s act of resistance is ultimatelya ‘‘lefteous’’ act, one performed with his ‘‘writing’’ hand andaccomplished —as he himself notes— through the use of a ‘‘tele-communcative’’ weapon (p.368). In the end, what triumphs overFielding’s superior physical strength is precisely Moraes’s letteredhand, the same lettered hand with which he will soon write themanuscript that will eventually save his life. And this crucial act of‘‘lefteous’’ resistance brings us back to our own point of departure.

I began this essay by noting that Rushdie wrote The Moor’s Last Sighprecisely during a period of forced confinement, and I have suggestedthroughout that the work exhibits more than just a passing nod both toCervantes’s own captivity and to Don Quixote. Tradition, of course,largely thanks to Cervantes’s own comments in his first prologue, haslong held that Don Quixote is the product of one of its author’s ownseveral incarcerations, as Borges himself notes in a poem ‘‘spoken’’ byCervantes which reads: ‘‘Both cruel stars and propitious stars / watchedover the evening of my genesis; /to the last of those I owe the prison / inwhich I dreamed of Don Quixote.’’42 But no matter how rightly scholarsmay insist that we should not take Cervantes’s claims literally,43 thereality of the supposed prison genesis of Don Quixotematters very little ina world of ever proliferating intertextualities, as Rushdie’s narrators inboth Midnight’s Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet point out:‘‘Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than thefacts’’; ‘‘If the facts don’t fit the legend, print the legend’’.44 Yet, despitewhat the title of this essay might imply, however, I have not argued thatThe Moor’s Last Sigh functions in any way as a kind of ‘‘version’’ of RuyPerez de Viedma’s autobiographical account of Cervantes’s Algeriancaptivity, or that the events presented in the text itself have any directrelationship to Rushdie’s own biography. Still, I would not go as far asthe writer himself does in disclaiming any connection between the texts’snarrator and its author. Bellow and Herzog notwithstanding, I believethat at a certain level Moraes is, in fact, Rushdie, and that this connectionis established precisely in the metaphoric debate over arms and letters hehas woven into the text.

Commenting on Pierre Menard’s own twentieth-century re-inscriptionof this debate, in which Don Quixote still decides in favour of arms,Borges’s narrator claims astonishment. Cervantes’s preference for arms,he says, is easily explained since he was an old soldier. But the fact thatPierre Menard’s Don Quixote –whose ‘‘author’’ was a contemporary ofBertrand Russell –would choose arms over letters is totally incompre-hensible, unless, of course, we allow for the fact that Pierre Menard hadthe peculiar habit of propagating in print ideas completely opposite tothose he actually held.45 Be that as it may, we cannot – I think – attribute




the same ironic detachment to Salman Rushdie, a writer who at the verymoment of composing his own Cervantine palimpsest was a virtualprisoner of the Iranian government. For Rushdie, solitary traveller in asinking balloon, ‘‘Lone Ranger’’ surrounded by hostile ‘‘Indians’’, theonly weapon available to him was his pen. Accordingly, what he did withhis several years of precarious solitude was publish a series of texts –Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), East, West: Stories (1994), andfinally The Moor’s Last Sigh (1996) – that on the one hand explore themost complex geopolitical issues of the late twentieth century, while onthe other hand defend – above all – the importance of fiction in the world.For, as he vehemently argued in his ‘‘Balloon’’ speech, ‘‘those who do nothave power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it,rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change,truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts’’.46 Or, inthe words of Moraes, ‘‘We inhale the world and breathe out meaning.While we can. While we can.’’ (p.54).

NOTES

A Spanish version of this essay has appeared in Esas primicias del ingenio:Jovenes cervantistas en Chicago, ed. Francisco Caudet, Madrid: Castalia,2002. Many thanks to Paco Caudet and to my USC colleagues RobertoIgnacio Dıaz and Sofia Ruiz Alfaro for their always helpful suggestions.

1 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’’, trans. Anthony

Bonner, Borges: A Reader, eds. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid,

New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981, p.100.

2 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, New York: Vintage Books, 1997,

p.139. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text.

3 See Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West,

New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990, pp.29–30.

4 ibid., p.204.

5 See ‘‘Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say fatwa against Rushdie irrevocable’’,

Agence France Presse, 13 February 1999, International news, available from

Lexis-Nexis, 12 September 2002, <http://www.lexis-nexis.com> ; ‘‘Iran FM

reasserts Rushdie death sentence amid conservative clamour’’, Agence France

Presse, 14 February 2000, International news, available from Lexis-Nexis, 12

September 2002. <http://www.lexis-nexis.com> ; ‘‘Islamists in Iran again

insist that Rushdie fatwa should stay’’, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 13

February 2001, International news, available from Lexis-Nexis, 12 Septem-

ber 2002, <http://www.lexis-nexis.com> .

6 Salman Rushdie, ‘‘One Thousand Days in a Balloon’’, The Rushdie Letters:

Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write, ed. Steve MacDonogh, Dingle, County




Kerry: Brandon Book Publishers, Ltd., 1993; Lincoln, Nebraska: University

of Nebraska Press, 1993, p.15.

7 ibid., pp.15–24.

8 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991;

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, New York: Picador, 2000.

9 A great deal of twentieth-century Cervantes criticism centred around

Americo Castro’s theory that Cervantes was motivated by his social status

as a converso (i.e. of Jewish origin) on his father’s side (see Americo Castro,

Cervantes y los casticismos espanoles, Madrid: Alianza, 1988). ‘‘Benengeli’’,

of course, comes from the name of the fictional Moorish historian, Cide

Hamete Benengeli, who supposedly wrote Don Quixote (of which the Spanish

novel is supposedly a ‘‘translation’’ from the Arabic). And Erasmus’s Praise

of Folly has been thoroughly studied as a source for Don Quixote, while

‘‘Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda’’ (a pseudonym for one of Cervantes’s

[still unknown] literary enemies) published an unauthorized and scurrilous

sequel to the novel in 1614, just as Cervantes was completing the manuscript

for his own second part.

10 Paul A. Cantor, ‘‘Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use of Spanish History’’

in The Moor’s Last Sigh’’, Studies in the Novel, 29, 3 (1997), 323–41.

11 ibid., p.323.

12 ibid., p.326.

13 ibid., p.327.

14 ibid., pp.322–5.

15 ibid., p.336.

16 Stephen Henighan, ‘‘Coming to Benengeli: The Genesis of Salman Rushdie’s

Rewriting of Juan Rulfo in The Moor’s Last Sigh’’, Journal of Common-

wealth Literature, 33, 2 (1998). 55–74.

17 ibid.

18 ibid., 71. Hispanists, of course, are likely to balk slightly at this assertion

given that most would probably locate the ‘‘foundations’’ of the Hispanic

tradition at the very least in the twelfth-century Poema de Mio Cid, if not in

the preceding Hispano-Arabic jarchas of the eleventh century.

19 ibid.

20 ‘‘Tales of the Alhambra’’, 336.

21 Midnight’s Children, p.6.

22 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p.127.

23 Salman Rushdie, ‘‘The Moor’s Last Sigh: Charlie Rose / 1996’’, Conversa-

tions with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder, Jackson, Mississippi:

University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p.206.

24 Midnight’s Children, p.13.

25 ibid., pp.206–7.

26 Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha,

trans. John Rutherford, New York: Penguin, 2001, pp.441–2.

27 ‘‘One Thousand Days in a Balloon’’, p.20.

28 Timothy Weiss, ‘‘At the End of East/West: Myth in Rushdie’s The Moor’s

Last Sigh’’, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4, 2 (2000),




paragraphs 23–4. Available online: 9 September 2001, <http://152.1.96.5/jouvert/v4i1/weiss.htm> .

29 For more on Monipodio’s criminal significance, see Carroll B. Johnson,

Cervantes and the Material World, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000,

pp.37–50.

30 See Luis de Camoes, Os Lusıadas, J.D.M. Ford, ed., Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 1946.

31 Compare this to Don Quixote’s own nostalgia for the golden age in Part I,

Chapter XI (pp.84–5).

32 Don Quixote, pp.45–7.

33 Incidentally, Rushdie has also established other important intertextualities

here with the work of E.M. Forster: Raman Fielding shares his surname with

one of the central characters from A Passage to India, while ‘‘Moraes’’ itself

is the surname of one of the central figures in Forster’s story ‘‘The Other

Boat’’. The importance of this connection to Forster will be discussed later.

34 See ‘‘The Moor’s Last Sigh: Charlie Rose/1996’’, pp.202–3.

35 I refer, of course, as does Rushdie himself, to Don Quixote’s lady ‘‘Dulcinea

del Toboso’’, whose ‘‘real’’ name is ‘‘Aldonza Lorenzo’’.

36 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths’’, trans. Helen Temple

and Ruthven Todd, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, New York: Grove

Press, 1962, pp.89–101.

37 ibid., p.97.

38 See Carmen M. del Rio, ‘‘Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard’ or Where is the Text?’’,

Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 25 (1978), 463.

39 ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’’, p.99.

40 See Tamara Holzapfel and Alfred Rodrıguez, ‘‘Apuntes para una lectura del

Quijote de Pierre Menard’’, Revista Iberoamericana, 43 (1977), 671–7; John

Incledon, ‘‘La obra invisible de Pierre Menard’’, Revista Iberoamericana, 43

(1977), 665–9; Emir Rodrıguez Monegal, ‘‘Borges, the Reader’’, Diacritics, 4

(1974), 41–9; George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford: OUP, 1975; and Michael

J. Wreen, ‘‘Don Quixote Rides Again!’’, Romanic Review, 86 (1995), 141–63.

41 ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’’, p.101.

42 Jorge Luis Borges, The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems, trans.

Alastair Reid, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976, p.67. The original Spanish

reads: ‘‘Crueles estrellas y propicias estrellas / Presidieron la noche de mi

genesis; / Debo a las ultimas la carcel / En que sone el Quijote’’ (see Jorge

Luis Borges, Obras completas, Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 1974, p.1092).

43 See Luis Andres Murillo, ‘‘Introduccion biografica y crıtica’’, El ingenioso

hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, Madrid:

Castalia, 1978, p.24.

44 Midnight’s Children, p.47; The Ground Beneath Her Feet, p.300.

45 See ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’’, p.52.

46 ‘‘One Thousand Days in a Balloon’’, p.17.




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