SOURCE: Cook, Rufus. “The Art of Uncertainty: Cultural Displacement and the Devaluation of the World.” Critique 41, no. 3 (spring 2000): 227-35.

In a “century of wandering” such as ours, Salman Rushdie suggests, it is the migrant who can be most productively identified as “the central or defining figure” (Imaginary Homelands 277), whose experience of “uprooting, disjuncture, and metamorphosis” can provide the most useful metaphor for coping with the confusions and contradictions characteristic of the postmodern world (IH [Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991], 394). Modern technological change and the radical discontinuity between industrial end-products and the raw materials from which they are made, which Wendell Berry describes (What Are People For? 193-94), have transformed all of us into “migrant peoples” (IH 279), displaced “from where [we] belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection” (Standing by Words 58). To the extent that we all suffer in modern times from the same problems of cultural discontinuity as the migrants of Rushdie (or Kingston or Naipaul), it seems to me that we might also benefit from some of the same “equipment for living” as these characters,¹ from some of the same tactics of cultural adaptation or ritual self-transformation. How do we slough off our old constrictive or inadequate selves to take on new more commodious or supple ones? How, in Rushdie's terms, do we migrate “from an old self into a new one” (IH 279)? That, to me, is the pivotal problem facing us in the contemporary world, and one to which “hybridizing” writers like Rushdie (or Kingston or Gish Jen) offer the best chance of a solution. Indeed, if those writers have one central contribution to make to contemporary life, it is probably the patterns that they provide of cultural change and transformation, the archetypes of ritual death and rebirth, of symbolic “transubstantiation.”

Of all the new cross-cultural, hybridizing writers, Rushdie has probably shown the greatest concern with the possibility of cultural adaptation or “transubstantiation.” Not only has he given us a roster of metamorphosing characters, of beauties who transform into beasts or angels who change into devils, he has also provided one of the richest lexicons in contemporary literature of the symbolism of spiritual transformation, the archetypes of ritual death and rebirth: references to discarded snake-skins (Shame 135, 145), to theories of mutation or reincarnation (The Satanic Verses 49, 405; 84, 133), to symbolic wombs (Midnight's Children 456) or umbilical cords (Verses 110, 154).

The opening chapter of The Satanic Verses is particularly interesting in this respect, focusing as it does on the problem of how “newness” comes into the world: “How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made” (8)? Beginning with the description of the sabotaged airliner as a “seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery,” the chapter describes the plummeting Saladin and Gibreel as though they were “bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork,” babies assuming the “recommended position for […] entering the birth canal […]” (4). In a characteristic act of dialectical “transubstantiation,” he “translates” catastrophic death into its dialectical opposite: into a mode of ritual rebirth. Having descended a “long, vertical tunnel” (6) through the “transformations of the clouds” (8), Gibreel and Saladin regain consciousness again on a snowbound English beach, spluttering and crying like newborn babies: “Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you” (10).

If Rushdie has taken the lead in cultivating a “migrant's eye view of the world” (IH 394), in addressing the need in modern society for rituals of change and adaptation, a similar concern is to be found in the works of other contemporary cross-cultural writers. V. S. Naipaul, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Michael Ondaatje—these writers are all troubled by the problem of cultural identity, by the question of how one cultural substance can be transmuted into another. Like Rushdie, they can all be approached effectively from a dramatistic point of view: for the strategies they provide for encompassing change, for the patterns of “reidentification” or “symbolic transubstantiation.”²

But if their transformations are to occur, if Indians are to turn into Englishmen or beauties into beasts, is not their other task also necessary: that of undermining reason, of disrupting our established sense of reality? Is not it necessary to expose what Burke refers to as the “false rigidity of concepts” (Attitudes 312): the illusion fostered by language that reality is “blocklike” and discontinuous, governed by the same logical or verbal distinctions as the human mind (Permanence 92-94)? Are not techniques required such as Burke's “planned incongruity” (93-94), his “symbolic merger” (Attitudes 328-29), or “paradox of substance” (Grammar 21-23)—techniques that emphasize the continuous interconnected nature of reality, the “consubstantiality” (Grammar xix) even of such obvious antitheses as intrinsic and extrinsic, action and passion, being and nothingness, beauty and truth (Grammar 23, 35, 38-43, 447-63)? Is not the required emphasis similar to the one found in many recent cross-cultural writers: on the “hotchpotch,” “incompatible” nature of the world, the tendency of one person or culture to “leak” incongruously into the other (IH 394)?

One cannot deny that Rushdie or Kingston make such an emphasis. Everywhere in their books eastern, western, traditional, modern cultural elements mingle incongruously: the introduction of an Airbus or Holiday Inn (Verses 486, 500) into a mystical Muslim religious pilgrimage or the appearance of a “hungry ghost” in a modern suburban kitchen (Men 176). Kingston is especially fond of the incongruous narrative point of view: of depicting American life from the perspective of a bewildered immigrant like Moon Orchid (Woman 113-41) or of interrupting a Chinese narrative with a parenthetical reminder of the adolescent American girl to whom it was originally told (Men 23; Woman 9, 21). The essence of modern urban reality, Rushdie maintains, is its “incompatibility,” its blunt juxtaposition of conflicting cultural traditions (Verses 314). One obvious purpose of a hybrid art such as his, or that of Kingston or Naipaul, is to provide the symbolic strategies necessary for coping with such a world, to create the languages of paradox or contradiction that might enable us to be “borne across” from our old inadequate or outmoded identities into new ones.

Even more effective in undermining our belief in “all continuous and stable forms of reality” (Graff 8), are the reminders, encountered everywhere in Kingston or Rushdie's books, that the story as they have been telling it is only “a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions” (IH 10). Kingston provides probably the most obvious examples of this technique when she confesses that her account of Moon Orchid's trip to Los Angeles is based on nothing more substantial than a sketchy third-hand report from one of her sisters (Woman 163), or when, having repudiated her original account of her father's immigration (“of course, my father could not have come that way. He came a legal way […]”), she goes on to offer a second, more respectable hypothesis (Men 53-60). Whether she is telling the story of Tang Fa Mu Lan, Moon Orchid, or the No Name Woman, Kingston is always conscious of possible alternative versions, of the conflicting political or cultural points of view from which the story might have been told.

Though Kingston may be more systematic in her use of this technique, offering full-scale alternative versions of many of her stories, it is Rushdie's examples that are the most subversive, whose assaults on referentiality are the most thorough going. Was Sufiya Zinobia turned into an idiot by brain-fever, as Rushdie assures us at one point in Shame, or was that explanation perhaps only “a figment of Bilquis Hyder's imagination, intended to cover up damage done by repeated blows to the [head …]” (125)? Was Babar Shakil transformed at death into an angel, as Rushdie initially leads us to believe, or did his metamorphosis take place only “within the grieving imagination of his mothers […]” (Shame 143)? Did Sufiya Zinobia blush “rubescently” the day that she was born, or has the incident perhaps “been a little embellished during its many tellings and retellings […]” (Shame 95)? Rushdie's narrator in Shame—and other novels—is seldom interested in confirming precisely the actual truth of the matter. Even at the risk of collaborating with the propagandists and the advertisers, of contributing to the same “hazy air of unreality and make-believe” (Midnight's 400),³ he is usually more interested in emphasizing the fluid, indeterminate nature of experience, in providing a foundation for a potential political “redescription” of the world (IH 13-14). As Rushdie has said of Gunter Grass, he is “quintessentially the artist of uncertainty […]” (IH 280).

Rushdie's most thorough assault on reality is probably the one carried out in The Satanic Verses. Not only do the characters in that novel have trouble maintaining “the boundary wall between dreams and reality” (340, 347), but Rushdie has seen to it that the reader does as well.⁴ Was Rosa Diamond once the mistress of Martin de la Cruz or wasn't she (Verses 152-53)? Did her husband finally murder him in a fit of jealous rage, or was the murderer his rival Don Enrique, or his girlfriend Aurora, or even Rosa herself, struggling to defend her honor (155)? “[M]emory's truth” (IH 25) is the only basis for such a decision that Rushdie seems to provide: whatever a character finally decides she would like to be the truth (Verses 152).

Many contemporary cross-cultural writers—Naipaul or Ishiguro as well as Kingston or Rushdie—have made a point of denying the referential value of their work, of referring to the countries that they depict as “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (IH 10).⁵ If anything is unique about Rushdie in this respect, other than the frequency or ingenuity of his disavowals, it is the explicit connection that he makes between the antimimetic position and the experience of cultural displacement. He argues that the emigrant or exile, of all people, should be most prepared by his experience to accept “the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties,” to acknowledge “that reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly […]” (IH 12, 280). In that respect alone, the migrant deserves the status conferred on him by Rushdie as the “central or defining figure of the twentieth century,” as the one who most fully exemplifies the dominant new “human-mind-centered” view of experience (Standing by Words 177). “The migrant intellect roots itself in itself,” Rushdie declares in his essay on Grass: “in its own capacity for imagining and reimagining the world” (IH 280).

The ultimate question for Rushdie or Kingston or Naipaul, however, is how to effectively transform the human identity, how to dispel the illusion that there is a fixed or stable or unified self. Common to all their works is the purpose that Rushdie ascribes specifically to The Satanic Verses: that of promoting “change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining,” of emphasizing the “incompatible,” “hotchpotch” nature of human identity (IH 394). A human being is “anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous” (Midnight's 283), Rushdie assures us, and his characters always turn out to contain “a second man” waiting for the chance to reveal himself: a saint is inside the libertine, a beast within the beauty (Shame 135, 241).

It makes sense for writers who are interested in promoting cultural change or adaptation to emphasize the fluidity or instability of human selfhood. How else is a beauty to turn into a beast or a libertine into a puritan unless such opposites exist in one another to begin with, unless a demon always is concealed inside an angel, a skeptic waiting inside the true believer? How else can any of us slough off our old inadequate or outmoded identities and take on more commodious or flexible or adaptable ones? Ambiguity or contradiction has the same basic appeal for Rushdie or Kingston that it has for Kenneth Burke. For them it provides an area where transformation might have a chance to occur, from which a person might conceivably be “borne-across” from one logical (or cultural, or psychological) substance into another.⁶

Desirable as it may be from the point of view of Rushdie or Kingston to have our sense of reality or referentiality undermined, the question still remains whether certain limits perhaps are not necessary to such disruptions, whether it might not be necessary, even in the process of trying to promote change, to maintain some sense of cultural continuity, some conception of objective standards or norms. Does it really makes sense to go as far as Rushdie sometimes does and to conclude that there is nothing more to reality than some sort of construct or artifact, that there is nothing more to cultural identity than a certain style of dress or pattern of speech—a mask of some sort that can be casually doffed or donned? Even among writers as dedicated to cultural change as are Kingston or Naipaul, there is usually some recognition of the dangers involved in any such total dissolution of cultural continuities.⁷ When it comes to “the emptiness of [the migrant's] luggage,” even an enthusiast like Rushdie seems suddenly to have misgivings. “[W]e have come unstuck from more than land” he warns at one point in Shame: “we have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time” (91).

From Wendell Berry's point of view, of course, the breakdown of standards of decorum or referentiality in recent literature is one more regrettable by-product of “modern urban nomadism,” of the characteristic modern delusion that “the mind is its own place […]” (Standing 57, 188). Not content simply to sever the “responsible connection” once believed to obtain between mind and reality or between art and experience (Standing 9), modern Faustian man has, in Berry's view, inverted the traditional relationship and given precedence to the mind as the source of value or meaning or order. As Gerald Graff puts it in his indictment of “the doctrine of literary autonomy,” the prevalent modern view is “that reality takes its orders from consciousness more than consciousness takes its orders from reality” (Graff 17). Precisely because of that specialized, professional pretense to autonomy or self-sufficiency Berry refers to contemporary American poetry scoffingly as “industrial poetry” or “cheap-energy poetry” (Standing 87, 110).

One result of the excessive new emphasis on the mind or the self, Berry maintains, is that the status of objective reality has been steadily denigrated in modern thought, that standards of “propriety, correct proportion, proper scale” (Standing 49) have been gradually undermined. The prevalent modern assumption is that “the human place in Creation” is “any place” (Standing 57), that the world consists of nothing more substantial than “‘raw materials’ or ‘natural resources’ or ‘subject matter’” (Standing 177), all waiting passively to be processed by the mind. “Unlike a life at home, which makes ever more particular and precious the places and creatures of the world,” Berry argues, “the careerist's life generalizes the world, reducing its abundant and comely diversity to ‘raw materials’” (Home Economics 51). How surprising is it that a Hemingway story should exhibit some of the same qualities of abstraction and depersonalization as those attributed by Berry to the computer screen or the plastic Clorox bottle? Is it not a product of the same subject-object distinction, of the same modernist assumptions concerning the autonomy of the mind? Is it not inevitable, beginning with assumptions such as those, that a writer would wind up regarding style as Hemingway does, as something to be imposed, “like a victorious general,” on the inchoate raw materials of the world (What Are People For? 70)?

A case could probably be made that all cross-cultural hybridizing writers are in fact contributing to the atmosphere of “unreality and make-believe” described by Berry. However, from many of their stories it is obvious that they are conscious of the dangers involved in their approach, that they are as anxious as Berry to maintain the necessary continuities, to determine what ought to be the limits to change and adaptation. Is that not the lesson to be learned from Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha or Kingston's Mad Sao—that if a person wants to alter his cultural identity something more might be required than simply assuming the appropriate “paleface mask” (Verses 43), that it might be necessary to go back to Bombay or Guandong or wherever one originated to come to terms somehow with all those “old, rejected selves” (Verses 529)?⁸

Although I could cite many other works in which the dangers of “the progressive dis-realization of the world” (Graff 8) are explored,⁹Typical American by Gish Jen probably accords most closely with Berry's analysis of the problems. It traces the pitfalls waiting for Ralph Chang, an immigrant accustomed to the constraints of a “terraced society” like China (177), as he tries to adjust to the “endless horizons” (85) offered by the more “spread out” United States (178). Ralph discovers that a person's status in America is not determined in advance by “all the things that might quaintly be termed [his] station” (177), but is something that he is free to create for himself. “Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be” (186).

What a person can become, Ralph decides, is limited only by his own powers of imagination, his ability to picture his “ideals” with sufficient clarity and intensity (88). He therefore decides to dedicate himself to the art of “imagineering,” to cultivating his “powers of positive thinking” (88-89). Beguiled by what Berry refers to as the attitude of “technological willingness” that pervades contemporary American society (Standing 60), Ralph winds up swallowing the whole line of seductive self-help rhetoric being dished out by his buddy Grover Ding. Eventually, he plasters his office walls with familiar gung ho entrepreneurial slogans: “All riches begin in an idea,” “Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out to meet it,” “What you can conceive, you can achieve” (198).

The result of Ralph's emphasis on the power of the mind is precisely what Berry predicts: a corresponding denigration of objective reality, of objective standards or limits or points of reference. Nothing from the entrepreneurial, technological point of view is ever quite as valuable as “what it might be changed into or what might be taken out of it” (Home Economics 51), Berry warns us. Ralph, with his enthusiasm for zany new get-rich schemes, provides some of the best evidence I know of for that claim. From Ralph's perspective the woods behind his house represent “opportunities” instead of trees, potential houses or paper instead of a habitat for skunks or raccoons—“or something more dangerous” (184-85).

Even more indicative of the speculative, hypothetical character of modern thought is his approach to calculating the profitability of the new addition to his new restaurant. “How long for the addition to pay for itself?” he wonders: “If business doubled say? Or if business tripled? Quadrupled?” As he contemplates the question, he begins to realize that there is no necessary limit to such suppositions, that he can make the numbers do practically anything he wishes: “He could predict business to go way up. He could predict business to go through the roof” (220-21). What better example could one ask for of the sort of “human-mind centered” thought that concerns Berry, that he blames for having destroyed our faith in objective limits or controls, in the capacity of language for “direct reference or designation” (Standing 33)? Ralph thinks that if he does not like the results of his calculations, all he has to do is to alter his premises: to assume that business is going to boom or that his overhead is going to come down, or even that he can forge his cash-receipts and report only half his income: “A third. A quarter. A tenth” (221). As Gerald Graff succinctly puts it: “The essence of capitalistic reality is its unreality, its malleable, ephemeral quality, which provides little in the way of a resisting medium against which personal identity can be formed” (8).

To describe the state of uncertainty into which Ralph is gradually drawn, Jen uses the same metaphor of moral weightlessness that Rushdie employs to explain what he regards as “the worst thing” about “migrant peoples and seceded nations” (91). Particularly after communication with his family is cut off following the fall of China to the Communists, Ralph begins to feel that the “center” has disappeared from his life, that he is being drawn in a “spiral” farther and farther from any established points of reference. “It was Natural Process; it was the slow shift of a pendulum's swing into a different plane” (32). As Ralph comes increasingly under the influence of Grover Ding and his gimcrack gospel of money and success, those feelings naturally increase. Even after his first excursion with Grover, his wife feels that their family has somehow become “ungrounded,” that they are like “astronauts, floating in space.” If there is to be any “fixed center” to their lives from now on, she decides, she would probably have to provide it (115). Beguiled by his dreams of becoming a “self-made man,” Ralph winds up surrendering almost completely to the speculative, futuristic mode of thought deplored by Berry: “Small doubts rained on him from time to time, but mostly he floated in hope, fabulous hope, a private ocean gentle and green” (193).

By the end of the novel, of course, the foolishness of his attitude has been brought forcefully home to Ralph. Far from attaining the god-like powers promised by the art of “imagineering,” he has been forced by the collapse of his business and the breakup of his family to recognize just how limited are his powers of understanding and control.¹⁰ Even more disturbing than the external limits are the internal or psychological ones that he has been forced to come to terms with: his inability to picture a clear alternative to a reality like the woods behind his house (184-85) or to figure out precisely what really are his own innermost impulses or desires (177-78). For the sad truth about a “spread-out” country like America is that, in dissolving the external constraints imposed by a traditional “terraced society,” it exposes a person even more painfully to the reality of his own personal shortcomings. That is the truth that Ralph struggles against from the beginning of the novel and that he manages finally to accept only on the last page: “He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so. American was no America” (296).

Even more important for my purposes than Ralph's recognition of his limitations is his renewed appreciation at the end of the book for the actual people and places that make up his world. Berry contends that the only power capable of turning a person back from the “deserted future” of the developer or entrepreneur, of restoring him once more to “the sphere of [his] being”—is the power of love (Standing 60-61), and the last few chapters of Jen's book provide a virtual casebook demonstration of that contention. Ralph not only undergoes a change remarkably similar to the one advocated by Berry, but he does so for essentially the same reason: because of the concern he suddenly feels for his comatose sister Theresa and his longing to atone somehow for his betrayals of love and trust (285). In the end, “imagineering giv[es] way to nostalgia,” and memories of his sister and recollections of his shattered family relationships wind up preoccupying him (285, 294-96). Forgotten are all the shady get-rich schemes, the dreams of instant, overnight success, the walls plastered with self-help slogans. In a transformation guaranteed to meet with Berry's approval, Ralph can be said to have come back finally to an appreciation of the actual “good at hand” (Standing 61), to an acceptance of “that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, […] in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery” (Standing 13).

Notes

1. This phrase as well as the concept of literature as a form of “symbolic action” is borrowed from Kenneth Burke's seminal essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in Permanence and Change, 293-304.

2. For a fuller treatment of the techniques of “transubstantiation” defined by Burke, see the Introduction (“The Five Key Terms of Dramatism”) and Section II (“Antinomies of Definition”) of A Grammar of Motives.

3. Rushdie's later works raise the obvious problem that Gerald Graff first persuasively defined in Literature against Itself: determining whether a specific “anti-realistic work” is one that provides “some true understanding of non-reality” or whether it is one of “those which are merely symptoms of it” (12).

4. As Spivak, especially, has effectively demonstrated, the disruption of reality in The Satanic Verses cannot be attributed simply to the madness of its characters. The breakdown is in the text and “not merely in the characters […]” (226).

5. Kingston and Naipaul are typical examples. Kingston refers to the China depicted in her books as “a country I made up” (Men 87); for Naipaul, Trinidad becomes “an imaginary place for me” (The Enigma of Arrival 311).

6. The main justification Burke gives for his project of studying and identifying “the resources of ambiguity” is the fact that “transformations” can occur in “areas of ambiguity: in fact, without such areas, transformations would be impossible” (A Grammar of Motives xix).

7. Exploring such dangers is one of the central themes not only of Rushdie's The Satanic Verses but also of the second chapter (“The Journey”) of Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.

8. I am not suggesting that a character can return to precisely the same reality (or identity) that he left behind. Whether it is Aadam Aziz returning to Kashmir (Midnight's 6) or Naipaul's narrator returning to Trinidad (Enigma 309-18), the return is always to a changing and hybrid reality. As Kingston's narrator poignantly reminds her mother in The Woman Warrior, there is “no more China to go home to” (106).

9. The most obvious examples are Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.

10. Ralph's recognition is couched in practically the same terms as Berry's: in terms of the mysterious unaccountability (and uncontrollability) either of external reality or of the human self (Typical American 177-78). The main failure Berry attributes to modern writers, as well as scientists and engineers, is the illusion that their particular style or discipline or terminology can be wholly adequate to the complexities of reality (Standing by Words 49; What Are People For? 65-69).

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. Home Economics. San Francisco: North Point, 1978

———. Standing by Words. San Francisco: North Point, 1983.

———. What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. Boston: Beacon, 1959.

———. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

———. Permanence and Change. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

———. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

Graff, Gerald. Literature against Itself. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.

Jen, Gish. Typical American. Boston: Houghton, 1991.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Random, 1977.

———. The Woman Warrior. New York: Random, 1975.

Naipaul, V. S. The Enigma of Arrival. London: Penguin, 1987.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.

———. Midnight's Children. New York: Viking Penguin, 1980.

———. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1989.

———. Shame. New York: Random, 1983.

Spivak, Gayati Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.