The Rushdie Grotesque

Overview & Synopsis

The grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s fiction, rather than being an ornament of comedy or horror, is a device to manage the attention economy, forcing concealed norms into visibility and thereby rendering them open to interrogation, negotiation, and change. This work unfolds this principal argument by first defining the grotesque – itself a notoriously difficult undertaking – before tying the resulting prototype-theoretical model to the notion of power and thereby five thinkers who have considerably shaped this discourse: Foucault, Bhabha, Kristeva, Agamben and Mbembe. This theoretical edifice is then, in a second step, used to analyse in detail the various works of Rushdie’s oeuvre, where incestuous desires, severed heads, migrant freaks, and burning widows are read as literary configurations through which issues of power, the body, migration, and gender are compelled to show themselves. Thus, at its core, this book proposes that any appreciation of Rushdie’s stories and their transgressive nature would be much reduced without the recourse they take to the grotesque interface and its ability to direct attention. The grotesque, after all, generates noise, and as Rushdie himself demands in “Imaginary Homelands”, one should always make “as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible.”