Straddling Generic Boundaries: The Subtexts of Medical and Socio-political Pluralities in Shame Dhriti Shankar College

Generic plurality is a matter of political statement for Rushdie. Intertextuality is an integral part of his historiographical metafiction. A variety of generic modes, with their points of origins both Asian and Euro-American, interpenetrate and transform one another, so that hybridization is extrapolated right into to the very heart of the formal register of his work. To name a few of these, Gothic horror, revenge tragedy, magic realism, postmodernist stress on the notion of play, comic caricaturing, oral narratives, and science fiction are easily identifiable in Shame, intermixing to transmute one another, until interpretation is forced to recognize the intricacy of the particular context where these tropes materialize. In Rushdie’s narrative logic, parentage becomes the literalized site of cultural transference. It is also the locus of claims of history on one. What should be noted, however, is that these transferences are not linear, but a two-way process in Rushdie, as the progeny procreates the parents as much as the parents procreate the progeny, literalizing Rushdie’s point about how any “newness” can possibly enter by the past flowing into the present (Teverson 57). This complex interplay is further clouded by the...