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Writing Beyond Words:
Metamorphosis, Schizophrenia and Hybridity in Ky and Rushdie

Thesis submitted to the Comparative Literature department, Haverford College, 2001

Salman Rushdie and Pham Van Ky, from India and Vietnam respectively, have written extensively on the experience of interculturality, notably in The Satanic Verses and Des femmes assises çà et là [1] where the protagonists of the novels struggle to cope with dramatic differences between their adopted and native environments.  Rushdie and Ky structure these narratives in inventive ways to express the intensity of this cultural shift; words are configured to express new levels of signification, thereby enlarging the capabilities of language's expressiveness.  Pham Van Ky and Rushdie "write beyond words" as they use language in inventive ways to express the array of sensations which result from the immigrant experience.

In this essay, I argue that metamorphosis, schizophrenia and hybridity are presented as textual responses to cultural crises.  Metamorphosis is the state of moving beyond traditional metaphors, at the point when words can no longer contain the force of their own signification.  Metamorphosis occurs in these novels linguistically, through inventive combinations of words, and as a literary device to conflate physiological change with psychological trauma.  The schizophrenic condition, although ultimately destructive, allows a creative and discursive range of thought.  Hybridity is the combining or conjoining of disparate concepts to create a "third state" of being.  Schizophrenia and hybridity are ways to move beyond limiting cultural binaries.

Essentially, Pham Van Ky and Rushdie explore what happens when language exceeds representation.  Metamorphosis, hybridity and schizophrenia are all layers of expansion in the possibilities of language.  This expansion is necessitated by the trauma of cultural change and by the inability to express thoughts that do not fit into standardized systems of representation.  Ultimately, Des femmes assises çà et là and The Satanic Verses are allegories about the creation of possibility.  The question, as Rushdie writes, is "How does newness enter the world?  How is it born?  Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?" [2] (Rushdie 8) Although interculturality is difficult to experience, Pham Van Ky and Rushdie's textual representation of it is extraordinarily rendered in these texts.

The texts: Migrancy and cultural disorientation

Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is no doubt famous: infamous would perhaps better describe this novel.  After the work was published in the UK by Viking/Penguin, it was immediately banned in India.  In the months that followed at least ten people were killed in riots in Pakistan and India, and emergency meetings were called all over the world in response to the crisis.  On February 14, 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa on Rushdie.  The next day, a national day of mourning in Iran, all Viking/Penguin books were banned from Iran and a £1,500,000 price was placed on Rushdie's life. [3]   This novel, perhaps more so than any other in recent memory, has led to questioning about the role of literature in world consciousness. 

But within the text (which was largely unread by its detractors) there is another level of literary questioning, as the characters and the language are figured into new forms of representation.  The novel as well undergoes organic development, as Rushdie noted in an interview:  "The Satanic Verses is very big…  And since it's so much about transformation I wanted to write it in such a way that the book itself was metamorphosing all the time." [4]  This, as well, is a way in which The Satanic Verses is a rebellious text, which expands the possibilities of language.  

As the novel opens, the central protagonists in The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, tumble out of the sky into the English Channel.  In this scene, newness and resurrection are presented as elemental to the immigrant experience.  Rushdie sets the stage for the development of these characters, as they seek to define whom they are without having a stable ground on which to stand.  The sense of dislocation instigated by immigration is just one of the symbolic associations with their fall into the sea.

These characters, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, have difficulty navigating between memories of their native India and the reality of their adult lives in England.  In Saladin's case, India seems reproachable.  England, with its dignity and restraint, appears far superior.  He moves to London as a schoolboy and although he initially finds his life nothing but embarrassing and frustrating, he still attempts mightily to fit in.  Later, he marries an upper class British beauty, Pamela Lovelace.  For him she represents jolly old England, "stinking of Yorkshire pudding."  She, in turn, marries him because of her interest in third world causes.  Their relationship is built on a foundation of misunderstanding and leaves both feeling unsatisfied.  Saladin's career, like his marriage, is an attempt to subsume his Indian-ness.  He is a voice-over actor, providing the personality to household cleaners and frozen peas on radio ads.  Although Saladin trains his flexible tongue to forget his Bombay lilt, he feels that he can never truly fit into British society and fears that he will always be different despite his best efforts.  Saladin's unsuccessful and incomplete transition to British life is deeply traumatic for him.

Gibreel Farishta was born into a family of poor lunch deliverers in Bombay.  After the death of both of his parents, he is fortunately adopted by a powerful family who paves the way for his future acting career.  Primarily, he plays leading roles in Bollywood "theologicals" as Hindu gods such as Vishnu and Ganesha.  His fame is unparalleled as Gibreel attains the same god-like state as the characters he portrays on screen.  The tensions of his public life are too much to bear; his personal chaos culminates in the eating of forbidden pork, thereby rebelling against his Muslim heritage.  At this point of crisis he rejects his life, career, and lover, Rekha Merchant (who throws her children, then herself, off her apartment building as a response).  At the moment Gibreel swallows the fateful pork, he notices Alleluia Cone, intrepid Everest climber and beautiful "Ice Queen."  They commence a torrid and short-lived romance before Allie returns to London.  The need for Allie drives Gibreel to make a journey to England: what he does not know is that the eating of the pig meat will soon trigger the start of a series of epic nightmares.  Ultimately, Gibreel's presence exists throughout most of the novel in reference to these dreams.  These nightly visions occur in a serial form and frighten him with their startling realism.  In his dreams, which trace the life of the prophet Mohammed, Gibreel appears as the Archangel Gabriel.

Gibreel's strong personality and mental weakness form an image of a man who has not been changed outwardly by the cultural shift, but whose idea of self and reality has been profoundly affected.  In many ways, though, Gibreel remains "at bottom an untranslated man" (Rushdie 442).  His inability to live in a sane and productive way develops not from the shame of losing himself in an oppressive culture, but rather his own tenuous hold on his self-perception.  While Saladin tries to shape himself to fit society, Gibreel tries to shape society to fit him and is ultimately unsuccessful.  But throughout the novel Rushdie presents Gibreel as a divine figure, who possesses special abilities to gain the trust of others: "from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfill people's most secret desires without having any idea of how he did it" (Rushdie 19).  In this way Gibreel is a complicated and flawed figure who still emanates strength, in contrast to Saladin's weak demeanor.

Rushdie presents the process of moving between cultures and languages as leading to a profound change in self-perception.  In the case of Saladin, this remade perception is developed into an extended allegory of alienation leading to physical mutation and transformation.  Gibreel's alienation is manifested by his dreams, which blur the boundaries of reality.

Like The Satanic Verses, Pham Van Ky's Des femmes assises çà et là is a complex and layered novel exploring the difficulties of immigration and cultural disorientation.  As opposed to the loud imagery found in The Satanic Verses, Pham Van Ky's novel is quiet and anxiously simmering.  Juxtaposed against the media frenzy and frenetic style of The Satanic Verses, this novel seems especially subdued.  The pace is slow and measured, carefully developing a rich psychological profile of the narrator.  Pham Van Ky's use of language is frequently striking, as he draws extensive meaning from the role of language in the narrator's experience.

Des femmes assises çà et là was published in 1964 in Paris.  Although not widely read, Pham Van Ky's work has garnered fame, as his novel Perdre la demeure won the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française in 1961.  However, Des femmes assises çà et là is now out of print and all but impossible to find.  It is considered one of the most important Francophone Vietnamese texts, a genre beginning to attract critical attention.  Jack Yeager, in The Vietnamese Novel in French writes of Vietnamese Francophone literature in general:

this is a literature of contradiction and irresolution, one challenging French colonial authority; it is thus implicitly political.  At the same time, it questions both Vietnamese and French culture and literature, ultimately denying both.  It is therefore an anomaly, a distinctive cultural phenomenon: a literary response to colonialism. [5] 

This denial is highly evident in Des femmes assises çà et là, as Pham Van Ky questions Vietnamese and French culture and reaches the conclusion many times in Des femmes assises çà et là that neither can express a complete range of emotion.  This binary opposition of West versus East flows through the text.

The plot development in Pham Van Ky's novel is less complicated than in Rushdie's text.  But in other ways, the work is just as dense, because of the complex web of significations that evolves through the text, incorporating thoughts, memory, and historical elements.  The protagonist is a first person male narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the novel.  He is an intelligent, thoughtful novelist, residing outside of Paris, after having studied at a French lycée in Quinhon. [6]  His occupation as a novelist plays a central role in the novel, as the reader experiences the narrator's life through his internal monologue, which becomes a sort of novel in its own right.  The narrator's female companions, around whom the story vacillates, are therefore characters on two levels: their personalities are shown in their written correspondence, as well as in the role that each plays in the mentally unstable narrator's conception of his world. 

The novel opens with a cablegram that his mother has sent: "T'attends pour mourir." [7]  He does not want to return to Quinhon, but feels pulled by her need and by his filial obligations.  This feeling of being torn in conflicting directions is a central thematic element throughout the novel.  Lisa Lowe remarks on the difficulty of the narrator's position:

Like many displaced postcolonial intellectuals whose origins are in the colonized cultures of Southeast Asia, North Africa, or the Caribbean, yet whose language is French and whose education has been administered by the French, the narrator is deeply disaffected with his life in the colonial metropolis, but nonetheless recognizes the impossibility of a simple return "home," a return as untenable as the hope that one might recover a precolonial culture uncontaminated by French influence. [8]

The narrator cannot return "home," just as he cannot negotiate a simple existence in France.  This difficulty is shown as he feels torn between his female friends, Orla, Eliane, and Solange.  Their personal attributes consume his thoughts, as he is unable to reach a level of comfortable intimacy with any of them.  He fears that he will not be able to communicate with them, and as the novel progresses, the narrator reveals the depth of this anxiety.  For instance, he will not answer the ringing telephone:

De nouveau sonnerie du téléphone.  Orla ou Eliane?  Je n'avais pas le courage de décrocher, n'étant pas sûr, avec mon esprit hirsute, de trouver les mots qu'elles attendaient de moi.  Les mots.  Les mots de notre vocabulaire, n'est-ce rien? [9]

The impossibility of finding the words they expect from him paralyze him.  He is consistently lost in a state of inaction such as this, to the point where he can scarcely leave his house because of his inability to make decisions.  The women around him contribute to his unease, as he attempts to decipher their motives and desires.  As he wavers between one and the other Eliane and then his mother both die.  The narrator is devastated, not having made a decision to truly be with either one and loses both of them without saying goodbye.  His anxiety and frustration with himself only increase as the text progresses. 

This example is not the only one in which the narrator's complicated relationship with words and language systems consumes him.  Despite his fluency, the French language is an enemy that thwarts his comprehension of Parisian society.  He is not able to truly be French, and language is a steady reminder of that.  Language, and more specifically words, appears in the novel as a character with frustrating attributes – rather like the women that confuse him.  He proclaims, "Oh!  Pouvoir et dérision des mots!" [10]  But, language is also how he can represent that confusion, creating a complicated internal system of signification. 

Unlike Gibreel and Saladin, the narrator is not an actor, or a person used to drama: as he says, "Hélas! Je ne suis qu'homme de lettres." [11]  He is accustomed to expressing his thoughts via words, written or otherwise unspoken, rather than through action.  But without the violent resolution of tensions that occurs in The Satanic Verses, there is no point at which the narrator can free himself from his paralyzing inner monologue.

In Des femmes assises çà et là the narrator vacillates between musings on language and on cultural identity, providing all the minutiae of his mental agony.  When the narrator is active and leaves his apartment he still expresses a sense of being wholly lost in mental and physical space.  As an intercultural subject, the narrator is an extreme case, but encompasses many troubling aspects of the immigrant experience.  Indeed, Yeager writes that "no Vietnamese Francophone novelist expresses the cultural conflict quite as extensively as Pham Van Ky" (Yeager 82).

Inventive and transformative language

The choice of which language to write in is a conscious, and important, decision for the bilingual author.  Rushdie chose to write in English, although he could have chosen Urdu, instead.  Ky is Vietnamese, but he wrote all of his professional writing in French.  Both chose to write in a European, rather than native, tongue.  Are they, or are they not, writing to their native cultures?  Perhaps they have reached this audience, indirectly.  Rushdie has been translated and disseminated around the globe and Ky, despite his relative obscurity, is considered to be a central writer of Vietnamese Francophone literature.  But, Rushdie and Ky intended primarily to reach a Western audience, as they chose prominent and mainstream publishing houses (Gallimard and Viking/Penguin).  Yeager comments that Pham Van Ky "indicated that he wrote in French… to educate, influence and finally convince [French] readership" about ramifications of Vietnam's colonial past and the difficulties of living in an intercultural space (Yeager 60).

Therefore, Ky would have assumed that the reader would be unacquainted with the following symbol that begins the first chapter of his novel:

This symbol from the I Ching creates a disorienting space for the Western reader, who would be expecting Roman numerical chapter headings.  The reader would feel the same sense of confusion that Ky's narrator feels in his foreign environment.  Britto writes, " A reader with no knowledge of the I Ching arrives at the narrative through a symbol legible only as a reflection of cultural ignorance, a sign that signifies in a register of untranslated otherness." [12]

Similarly, many aspects of Rushdie's portrayal of the birth of Islam would be new to a European reader, who would not be familiar with, for example, Hind, Baal, and Ayesha.  Ky and Rushdie have, in this way, developed a textual sense of disorientation similar to the feeling of the novels' protagonists, who live within frequently confusing and disorienting worlds.  This is an inventive, unusual and deliberate manipulation of the way that language is used to narrate.  Textual disorientation, therefore, is another level on which these writers, though writing far apart temporally and geographically, find common ground.

The texts reveal other fascinating examples of textual disorientation, as well: for example, the transition from metaphor to metamorphosis which occurs in The Satanic Verses and a similar sort of metamorphosis in Des femmes assises çà et là as the narrator relates characters with words, blending the attributes of each.  Both of these narrative conceits blur the boundaries of how language can be used, and thus begin to move beyond language and beyond a standard use of words.  This creative use of language expresses the complicated nature of the bicultural experience, which cannot be transcribed using facile, straightforward language.  The question of physicality, whether in the form of the body or the alphabet, finds careful consideration here, as in these texts the body is a site of translation.  This conflation and metamorphosis of language and bodies creates a sense of newness and possibility inherent in the immigrant experience, despite the traumatic nature of extreme change.

The textuality of physical metamorphosis: Rushdie

The Satanic Verses begins with the aftermath of a plane explosion.  Farishta and Chamcha's plane, the Bostan, is hijacked by Canadian Sikh terrorists, [13] who prefer suicide to a shameful landing.  These two men are the only survivors, falling from a height of 29,002 feet (incidentally, the height of Mount Everest) into the English channel.  By all reasoning, they should not have lived.  During their protracted tumbling, they see the assorted wreckage from the plane and body parts of the other passengers, while they sing nonsense songs and clutch each other, head to foot.  Rushdie writes:

[T]he two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yessir, but not random… when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible – wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.  (Rushdie 6)

Saladin and Gibreel are merging, melding their characteristics to become "Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha," a new, hybrid form.  Their names are conjoined just as their bodies are, and their personal attributes become dislodged and flow freely between themselves.  Gibreel's formerly sulfurous breath is gone when they wake up on the beach in England; it now graces poor Saladin.  In this flagrantly allegorical passage, Rushdie is positing that the extreme immigration experience that these two undergo is forceful enough to change them fundamentally.  Putting their names together is a creative way to underscore this severe process of transmutation.  The physical change of their names, if even for a second, corresponds to the change in their own physicality, represented by the transfer of halitosis.

The fall is "angelicdevilish," being a fall from grace and also a divine experience; again, the neologism is capable of containing the two disparate concepts and at the same time presenting them as a new concept.  This newness and importance of the moment resonates throughout the text.  In this passage, Rushdie sticks other words together, as well.  "Wayupthere" expresses what "way up there" cannot: the urgency of the moment and the extremity of the occurrence.

Some time after their miraculous landing, Gibreel develops a faintly glowing halo, and Saladin grows horns and cloven hooves.  This man, who appeared in so many ways as the perfect British gentleman, becomes a giant stinky goat.  Saladin's transformation begs the question, was he ever truly accepted in the London world he desired?  Now, without the benefit of his comfortable shell, Saladin is revealed to himself as being the foreigner that he always, in fact, was.  His physical state eventually returns to normal, but the emotional injury of his transformation lingers.  Saladin's deliberate attempt throughout his life to conform is, in this way, ultimately thwarted.  Rushdie writes, "Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against human history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false'" (Rushdie 441).  This falsity is revealed to him through the magical metamorphosis started during the fall.  All pretense and fraudulence is swiftly stripped away.

Gibreel, on the other hand, acquires characteristics of an archangel.  He starts to gently glow, which leads those around him to subconsciously trust him.  This is the case, for example, when the British police arrest Saladin for illegally entering the country but do not touch Gibreel.  Saladin despises him for this, and vows revenge – but Gibreel's life is not much easier than Saladin's.  Being an archangel is terrifying, as his dreams become confused with his life, and he starts to go insane.

Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes aware, without the dream, of himself sleeping, of himself dreaming his own awareness of his dream, and then a panic begins, O God, he cries out, O allgood allahgod, I've had my bloody chips, me.  Got bugs in the brain, full mad, a looney tune and a gone baboon.  (Rushdie 94)

He is diagnosed as being clinically schizophrenic.  The question remains whether or not Gibreel is truly insane, and if his dreams do have meaning outside of their ethereal context.  Perhaps by doing this Rushdie could possibly deflate the inflammatory content of the novel.  If the questionable episodes are the deluded dreams of a crazy man, then the author is, in a way, not committing defamation.  But the dreams themselves are not insignificant, and Gibreel's mental distress is not trivialized as a disorder.  He is, for all intents and purposes, truly the Archangel Gabriel.

New combinations of words, Saladin's transformation into a goat, and Gibreel's appearance as an angel are all unusual manipulations of the physical states of language and bodies.  This intersection of metamorphosis and textuality extends the logic of the metaphor to a new place, as metaphor itself cannot fully express what has happened.  Deleuze and Guattari define this shift between states as follows:

Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor.  There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.  The thing and other things are no longer anything but intensities overrun by deterritorialized sound or words that are following their line of escape. [14]

Essentially, metamorphosis, as a textual construct, occurs when the meaning of the subject overruns the possibility of signification.  The subject is too intense to be stated as a metaphor.  A metaphor, such as when Rushdie writes "the airplane cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery," contains within it a certain stopping-point (Rushdie 4).  The airplane is not a seed-pod or an egg; it retains its airplane-self although it has similarities to these other objects.  The airplane, therefore, is not really a seedpod.  When Saladin becomes a devilish goat, (or a goatish devil), Rushdie is not saying that he is acquiring devil-like or goat-like qualities.  The extremity of the cultural crisis he faces and the strength of suggestion offered by way of stereotype are powerful enough to trigger changes that happen beyond what can textually be contained by way of metaphor.  Thus, the object, Saladin's physical form, is overrun and metamorphoses into an object which can accommodate these intensities, textually existing, therefore, in the same way as "wayupthere" and "Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha."  In this way, Rushdie conflates words with bodies, as both are susceptible to the limits of their own signification.  The physicality of words, that is, their alphabetical construction, is mutated by the author's will to contain more, and different, information from what the words typically mean, like the metamorphosis of the physical forms of the protagonists.

The physicality of textual metamorphosis: Ky

The unnamed narrator in Des femmes assises çà et là, as a transplanted person and a novelist by trade, has an especially intimate relationship with language.  Language connects him with his home, in Vietnam, and in particular, his mother.  His "langue maternelle" resides in him as memory and dream.  French is a mysterious language that always remains out of his grasp, and his relationships with his friends in France are, of course, mediated through the use of French.  In addition, as a novelist, words are his vocation: language therefore occupies an all-powerful position in his psyche.  His experiences are translated through words, and are changed by words.

Because of these factors, the narrator finds in words a range of possibilities that would be closed to someone less sensitive to their power of representation.  Words and images collide in the following episode, which is a flashback to when the narrator took himself out to a fashionable café to celebrate the successful end of his lycée in Hanoi.  He is confused by the menu and, not knowing what to order, chooses an artichoke because he finds the word artichaut so appealing.

J'ignorais ce qu'est la chose.  Mais le mot, un sortilège – n'y a-t-il pas art? – scandé à voix basse, me fit passer d'une fièvre ardente—chaut—à une fièvre frileuse, me représentant l'illogisme d'une éducation par la clarté—en opposition à la notre: par la poésie—où j'avais dû aborder, avant l'artichaut, la trigonométrie et Malebranche [15]

The narrator tries to eat the artichoke, but he does not know how.  The restaurant patrons watch in amused horror as he puts an entire leaf into his mouth.  He chews hopelessly until giving up, saddened by the impossibility of understanding French culture: "je désespère… depuis ce malentendu fondamental, d'atteindre au cœur de l'Occident." [16]  He does not know how to eat it, and is not aware that the heart of the artichoke is the desired part.  Just as he cannot consume it and is ignorant of its tender center, he is, as well, unable to penetrate the mystery of French culture.  But, it is the word artichaut that causes him to swoon with "a shivery fever."  It is a magic spell, tempting him and leading him into this embarrassing situation.

In this instance, the word artichaut is filled with signification, as word and image are conflated. But more central to the novel's construction is the relationship between words and characters.  The narrator is ceaselessly analyzing actions and attributes of Mère, Orla, Solange and Eliane.  They confuse him and elate him, and he understands them through an inventive use of words.  He translates, for example, the essence of Eliane into letters of the alphabet – to understand her, to explain her, and to poetically reach her character.  Her death a few weeks earlier from leukemia is too intense for the narrator to deal with, and he uses poetry to try to recapture her.  Ky writes,

Il me fallait aborder l'inaccessible: Eliane. Six lettres seulement.  Après tout, avais-je à me plier à un code établi?  Eliane donc.

E-L-I-A-N-E.

E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes, Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles.

L.  L comment, Rimbaud?  Bah!  les consonnes:  bourses plates, Tom-Pouce, Lilliputiennes, micozoaires, piquette!

I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes.

A, noir corset velu des mouches éclantants Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles, Golfes d'ombre.

N.

E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes…

Rimbaud ni la vertu des voyelles n'agissaient. [17]

The poem that he creates is derived partly from a poem by Rimbaud, a nineteenth century French poet.  Rimbaud's "Voyelles" ("Vowels") is a meditation on color and images associated with different vowels.  But, "Voyelles" is insufficient for capturing the spirit of Eliane through words, and not only because Rimbaud does not provide signification for the necessary consonants.  By deconstructing E-L-I-A-N-E in hopes of revealing a deeper meaning hidden within her name, the narrator is allowing the language of the signifier (her name) rather than the signified (Eliane herself) to direct his mode of thinking.  Like the artichaut, Eliane does not reside in her name and looking for her there is mentally destabilizing.

The unusual connections formed between word and image in these examples exist solely within the mind of the narrator.  But this association of words and physical bodies reaches an even greater extent in several striking scenes of bodily transformation by way of linguistic figuring.  For example, Solange recounts a dream in which she becomes the narrator.  When she wakes up, she finds

les feuillets dans mon cou, épars sur l'oreiller, insérés entre mes seins.  J'avais transpiré.  Trois lignes entières d'une de tes lettres avaient déteint sur moi, imprimées à l'envers.  Un miroir!  J'y lisais nettement: toujours présent… qui vient de naître… Occident… Orient... [18]

The dream becomes reality as Solange acquires, in a literal sense, the words of the narrator.  This transferal of language is powerful, intimate and bizarre.  But despite being transfigured by the narrator's words, there is a kind of inherent incompletion because Solange is not able to read the words without the aid of a mirror.  Still, however, these words are textual, visual and substantial.  Words are transforming her, just as words are being transformed in order to reach a new level of signification.

In The Satanic Verses and Des femmes assises çà et là the authors use bodies and language together, to create a fascinating juxtaposition of meaning.  The intense reactions of the protagonists to the challenges of immigration, and to communication problems in general, become manifested in these created language systems. 

Moving beyond binaries: Inventive circumstances

Gibreel, Saladin and the narrator are all caught between cultural spaces, and their speech and memories are bifurcated by this geographic displacement.  References to duality abound in both texts, as the world is split into opposing forces.  Losing faith in traditional binaries opens possibilities for inventive circumstances – physical and textual transformations on one level, and the associated mental destabilization on another level.

Twoness as a relay to a multiplicity: The schizophrenic condition

The narrator and Gibreel Farishta are both diagnosed with schizophrenia in the course of the novels.  I argue that despite the destructiveness of their mental problems, the schizophrenic condition does provide a model for liberation from the restrictive binaries of East and West.  This liberation is unsuccessful in Des femmes assises çà et là, however, because the schizophrenic narrator is ultimately unable to function due to his obsessive relationship with language. 

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder characterized, in part, by paranoia and the inability to function normally in society.  Beyond the standard clinical definition of schizophrenia, there is another definition of which Brian Massumi, in A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, offers the following summary:

The "schizophrenia" that Deleuze and Guattari embrace is not a pathological condition.  For them, the clinical schizophrenic's debilitating detachment from the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in imaginative ways.  Schizophrenia as a positive process is inventive connection, expansion rather than withdrawal.  Its twoness is a relay to a multiplicity.  From one to another (and another…). From one noun or book or author to another (and another…).  Not aimlessly.  Experimentally.  The relay in ideas is only effectively expansive if at every step it is also a relay away from ideas into action.  Schizophrenia is the enlargement of life's limits through the pragmatic proliferation of concepts. [19]

This statement clarifies the nature of Ky's narrator's reaction to his mental state and physical environment.  In particular, the narrator is a schizophrenic subject in respect to his use and appropriation of elements of language.

For instance, he engages language in imaginative ways by creating metaphors, such as describing Eliane's  "enveloppe charnelle" [20]  These images are, indeed, very imaginative and show a high level of creativity and detachment from traditional modes of representation.  Ky is able to present unique lenses for looking at the narrator's world, for instance, by breaking down the name Eliane into its component letters.  When he deconstructs E-L-I-A-N-E in hopes of revealing a deeper meaning hidden within her name, the narrator is allowing the language of the signifier (her name) rather than the signified (Eliane herself) to direct his mode of thinking.  He is unable to develop a productive relationship with her before her death, providing the final gesture towards the narrator's mental collapse.  His "inventive connections" cannot strike at the heart of his communicative desires.  In addition, he is aware of the impossibility of moving beyond the signifier and his reliance on names is a consciously empty gesture.  In this way, his actions are quelled by the disappearance of the signified, or at least by his frustrated attempt to reach the signified solely via language.

The narrator's creative formulation of text and body is expansive, in the sense that this gestural movement towards understanding is greatly imaginative.  He is able to move out of standard systems of understanding concepts, thanks to his (wildly problematic) existence at the mercy of disparate cultural and linguistic systems.  But at the same time these same formulations inhibit movement and expansion because of the narrator's overwhelming need to filter and transcribe his experiences, a need that in the end renders him immobile.  For example, he ponders

mon festival des consonnes et de voyelles, de diphtongues, de labiales faibles et fortes, de dentales chuintantes ou cérébrales, de gutturales, d'aspirées, d'explosives, de fricatives, de vélaires, de labio-vélaires, de palatales, matérial d'une calligraphie sonore, nullement abstraite, pleinement consolatrice et adoucissante, grâce à l'apport inépuisable des hauteurs, des timbres, des valeurs de position, des interférences, des effets d'induction, des résonances et assonances, des miroitements en-dessous… j'échouais à communiquer avec elles malgré la complicité qui s'était nouée auparavant entre nous… [21]

He is consumed by the physical process of creating language, and by the linguistic categories of speech forms.  This obsessive thought prohibits his communication with Orla, Eliane and Solange.

The phrase "Twoness is a relay to multiplicity" perfectly captures the process of binary breakdown leading to an infinite array of possibilities.  This, however, is contradictory to the goal of Taoism, whereby the world is rendered through conjoined opposites.  The narrator seeks this Taoist synthesis – especially when pondering his adopted city, Paris.  He proclaims that Paris is "la synthèse de tous les opposés." [22]  He frequently finds these "opposites" associated with the banks of the Seine and wishes that he could be like the river: flowing serenely between opposing geographic forces.  But later he realizes the impossibility of embodying this synthesis of opposites:

Un aréopage d'écrivains m'accordait l'honneur d'un interrogatoire où je bafouillais lamentablement.  L'un d'eux me demanda, le taoïsme ayant été lâché, ce que je pensais des rives droite et gauche de la Seine.  "Elles sont une," déclairai-je, "et en me promenant sur l'une je longe en même temps l'autre."  Ah!  Quel piège! [23]

He recognizes that he cannot be on both sides of the Seine at once.  Although the river itself can touch both banks, he is confined to one at a time.  In this way the narrator is seeking synthesis as well as multiplicity, but cannot find either.  The narrator is incapable of being a successful schizophrenic, just as he cannot fully apply Taoisme to his Parisian life.

Therefore the narrator is not a complete or active schizophrenic and consequently is unable to derive productive signification from his surroundings.  The schizophrenic subject engages the world, but Ky's narrator finds this to be difficult.  For instance, he can never find comfortable intimacy with his friends, Eliane and Orla, or his lover, Solange.  Also, he cannot truly engage his adopted culture because of inherent differences.  It appears as if he is only engaging language, which through its incompleteness (because of the impossibility of reaching the signified, of finding Eliane behind E-L-I-A-N-E) drives him in his journey towards madness.

If metamorphosis is the state in which metaphor no longer applies and where it can no longer function, then surely this is the case in Ky's text.  The metaphors presented are actionless, and the narrator cannot move to any point beyond language.  Perhaps if his thoughts could expand, he could find a way out of his dilemma.  But  because he is constrained by textual metaphors this state can never be reached. 

In The Satanic Verses, as the Indian protagonists are changed, literally, into what the white Londoners conceive them to be, and shift towards another state. rather than a metaphorical substitution, would occur.  This state can be clearly seen in The Satanic Verses, as the Indian protagonists are changed, literally, into what the white Londoners conceive them to be.  It is not enough to say that Saladin is like a Devil – a simile.  Even to say that he is a devil in a metaphorical sense could not capture the depth and extent of his alienation.  Saladin is indeed a devil – where there was once Saladin, now there is a devil in a complete metanymic rather than solely linguistic shifting.  In this way there is a movement beyond the textual metaphor and into another state altogether, as metaphor has given way to metamorphosis. 

Schizophrenia, which has the potential to be liberating for Ky's narrator, is, in the end, restrictive, because he cannot move out of a language based interiorized system.  Only through externalizing, deterritorializing and metamorphosing conceptions of self, such as in The Satanic Verses,  can true expression occur.

Twoness as a relay to a multiplicity: Cultural hybridity and eclecticism

Hybridity, like schizophrenia, allows a new understanding of perceived binaries.  Hybridity, or the creation of a synthesized whole out of disparate elements, is a state of  expanded possibilities.  In The Satanic Verses and Des femmes assises çà et là, just as language passes from a metaphorical rendering to a metamorphic one, hybridity is also created out of intercultural shift.  Also like schizophrenia, hybridity used in this context can be problematic to define. [24]  It is, however, an interesting model for understanding the creation of newness resulting from the experience of immigration.

Hybridity In The Satanic Verses is an important thematic element, and the possibility of the creation and success of true hybridity is frequently questioned.  Saladin and Gibreel are only two of the many characters who examine their intercultural life in this way.  Saladin, in particular, struggles over the conflicting elements of his past.  While watching television one day he sees multiple references to hybrid forms; one in particular is striking, allowing Saladin to find reprieve.

On Gardeners' World he was shown how to achieve something called a chimeran graft… and although his inattention caused him to miss the names of the two trees which had been bred into one, the tree itself made him sit up and take notice.  There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world.  If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive.  (Rushdie 420)

The tree is a successful combination of disparate forms, of which Saladin himself is incapable of achieving.  The tree provides Saladin with an image of hope for creating a successful life out of his difficult past.  This is not the first time that he has recognized hybridity as a viable life pattern – his friend, Zeeny Vakil, places great importance on this concept.  When he first realizes the effectiveness of her way of living, he rejoices: "Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity.  The optimism of those ideas!"  (Rushdie 297)  It is not until the end of the novel, however, that Saladin is able to create peace within himself.

Zeeny, although a minor character, is an important example of a character finding happiness in The Satanic Verses.  She has enormous faith in the ability to coalesce disparate ideas:

She was an art critic whose book on the confining myth of authenticity , that folklorist straightjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest? – had created a predictable stink, especially because of its title.  She had called it The Only Good Indian.  "Meaning, is a dead," she told Chamcha as she gave him a copy.  "Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog?  That's Hindu fundamentalism.  Actually, we're all bad Indians.  Some worse than others."  (Rushdie 53)

Zeeny's ability to think creatively about interculturality and to take risks inspires Saladin.  In particular, she is able to exteriorize notions of difference.  Her focus on art and history, rather than on internalized angst, allows her to deal effectively with the difficulty of interculturality. 

I propose that in this way Zeeny's understanding of hybridity could more accurately be described as eclecticism.  Hybridity itself implies a kind of purity, because its biological implications indicate a completely internalized and considered set of qualities.  By focusing on eclecticism rather than internalized hybridity, the intercultural subject has a more concrete goal – this seems to counteract the madness that appears in both novels. Art provides an outlet, a way to externalize mental conflict.

A closer look at the chimeran graft excerpt reveals a subtle way in which Rushdie refutes the offered example of successful hybridity.  A chimera, as well as being an organism consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic compounds, is also an imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts. [25]  Rushdie is saying essentially that a completely internalized hybridization is impossible – leaving eclecticism as being a viable and necessary option for living as a displaced person.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Rushdie and Pham Van Ky's usage of language is highly inventive – The Satanic Verses and Des femmes assises çà et là are extraordinary texts that describe the immigrant experience through their language and structures.  Through metamorphosis, the intensity of interculturality is expressed, and through schizophrenia and mental breakdown the extreme difficulty of the protagonists' experiences are rendered.  Schizophrenia and hybridity are described as ways in which to supersede imposed binaries.  Hybridity, though ostensibly a viable option for understanding disparate cultural attributes, is ultimately less desirable than the notion of eclecticism.  In this way, interculturality is perhaps best dealt with in non-theoretical terms, as personal questioning is inherently self-defeating.

Bibliography

Britto, Karl Ashoka.  Disorientation:  Interculturality and Identity in Vietnamese   Francophone Literature.  Dissertation, Yale University, 1998.

Goonetillike, D.C.R.A.  Salman Rushdie.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Lowe, Lisa "Literary Nomadics in Francophone Allegories of Postcolonialism: Pham Van Ky and Tahar Ben Jelloun"

Massumi, Brian.  A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 1992.

Pham Van Ky.  Des femmes assises çà et là.  Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964.

The Rushdie File edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland.  London:  Fourth Estate Limited, 1989.

Rushdie, Salman.  The Satanic Verses.  New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Stross, Brian.  "The Hybrid Metaphor From Biology to Culture."  Journal of American Folklore 112 no445 254-67 Summer 1999.

"Toward a Minor Literature."  Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix.  Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Yeager, Jack.  The Vietnamese Novel in French: A  Literary Response to Colonialism. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987.

Texts Consulted

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory.  London: Verso, 1992.

Boundas, Constantin V.  (editor).  The Deleuze Reader.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World.  New York: St. Martin Press, 1989.

Harrison, James. Salman Rushdie.  New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Lombard, Denys. Rêver l'Asie.  Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993.

Taboulet, Georges.  La Geste Francaise en Indochine. Paris: Adrian Maisonneuve, éditeur, 1955.

Werbner, Pnina and Modood, Tariq.  Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism.  London: Zed Books, 1997.

Endnotes