‘The stories of anywhere are also the stories of everywhere else’: Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

In a 2005 interview with the Paris Review, Salman Rushdie said: ‘My life has given me this other subject: worlds in collision. How do you make people see that everyone’s story is now a part of everyone else’s story? It’s one thing to say it, but how can you make a reader feel that is their lived experience?’¹ His statement makes a case for the ability of literature to encourage readers to empathically imagine themselves into the ‘lived experience’ of the other, producing new global ties not unlike those that Judith Butler has called for in her recent work (see Chapter 1). However, like Dave Eggers’ What Is the What — as well as the majority of other authors I have discussed in this study — Rushdie’s post-9/11 fiction does not stop at a redressing of imbalances in empathy (or of the power structures that underlie it), but additionally works towards a deconstruction of the categories of identity and difference that allow such an imbalance to occur in the first place. Bringing to a conclusion the expansion of this argument’s scope that began in Chapter 3, which focused on novels that challenge perceptions of difference between two national identity categories (the United States and Iraq), the trans-nationalism of Rushdie’s recent fiction is such that this final chapter is less delimited by country or identity type. While the previous two chapters explored a complex negotiation of difference in fiction, this chapter is more interested in the broader question of what it means to be different in a widely globalised post-9/11 world.