Mapping Imaginary Spaces In Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Mapping Imaginary Spaces in Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Daniela Rogobete

Today everything that derives from history and from historical time must undergo a test. Neither 'cultures' nor the 'consciousness' of peoples, groups, or even individuals can escape the loss of identity that is now added to all other besetting terrors... nothing and no one can avoid trial by space. (Lefebvre in Burgin, 1996: 23)

Space and its recontextualisation, its metaphoric representations and political remappings have always preoccupied the theorists of postcolonialism who tried to find new ways of reading its physical and metaphorical coordinates. A relativisation of both space and time was long ago operated so that territories were reshaped, boundaries retraced in an attempt to reconfigure reality according to new dimensions. Relocation of centre and periphery, margins and interstitial spaces were redefined within what has been called the politics of location requiring a new vocabulary belonging to spatial language. It places identity, no longer envisaged in tight relation to a definite place, race gender or culture in the "

The difference between modernism and postmodernism in terms of displacement is most of the time defined as lying in the opposite conception of space seen as unitary in modernism versus the hybrid cosmopolitan space favoured by postmodernism. Whereas modernism was said to have been interested in an absolute, coherent space, postmodern culture seems to be increasingly interested in spatial logic. Frederic Jameson introduced the idea of devising cognitive maps serving on the one hand to offer space a different perspective and on the other, to provide metaphors for the metaphysical coordinates of space, so far slightly ignored, and for class struggle and social organisation, relying upon Laclan's affirmation that any representation of space is political. "That is exactly - he affirms - what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to the vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole." (Jameson in Leach, 2002: 31)

Mapping physical space relies upon a definite anchorage into reality by pinning it down by means of definite coordinates and well-established boundaries; economical and political considerations only come to further increase the "reality" of the place, giving its inhabitants the feeling of fully possessing it. The situation changes when space is caught within a clash of representations or when the native finds his space described and re-invented by the coloniser whether ideally embellished as an exotic paradise inhabited by "good savages" or as a corrupted, inferior place where cruel barbarians are to be forcibly civilised. Mapping space within colonial travel accounts meant "exoticising" the place and turning it into a counterpart of a homely, too well-known reality, practically recreating it so as to fit the traveller's desire for recasting old shapes into new moulds but gradually exoticism wore off and the marginal foreign place started being used in order to highlight the superiority of the metropolitan space. Smith and Katz (Grounding Metaphor) see mapping as a particular form of conquering space, translating what is being mapped into the map itself. Space progressively came to be judged according to the cultural and ideological gaze which totally transformed it almost lending it a new reality. The map metaphor was usually taken to stand for cartographic enclosure and conventional delimitation and most of the time it is undermined and deconstructed. Graham Huggan sees the map either as an "agent of cultural transformation" or as a means of "revisioning cultural history".

Space has gradually ceased to be envisaged in its physical, measurable dimensions and started revealing its connections to problems of identity, social, political and cultural practices. Rejecting the idea of space seen as "container without content" Henri Lefebvre imagines space as a human practice establishing three stages in spatial representations: perceived - related to spatial practices translating social relations in particular spaces (ghettos, public spaces), conceived - related to representations of space which activate conceptual abstractions (Cartesian geometry, linear perspectives etc) and experienced as the representational space appropriated by imagination. The new representations of space take into account a subtle overlapping of physical and mental spaces which require special strategies of mapping. (Lefebvre in Burgin, 26 - 27)

When analysing the Empire's discourses, Robert Young refers to Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of colonial spatialisation as a form of "writing geography" (Young 170). Their theory on territorialisation relies upon three factors usually taken into account when dealing with post-colonial redefined territory: remapping the world according to new forms of appropriation of both geographical and cultural space, nomadism - as a form of resistance to state authority in its various forms of exile, migration or terrorism at limit, and violence as engendered by direct or reversed colonisation. The theory of territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation shed light to "the dynamics of the colonial or imperial propagation of economic, cultural and social spatialisation" (id., 171).

The map had to be generally taken as a representation of a physical space strictly confining it into fixed coordinates and exact dimensions. Designed for practical purposes of location and orientation maps have long been ignorant of cultural and metaphysical dimensions thus leading to a deadening of space. The admission of the fact that absolute spaces as well as their graphic representations are utopian ideas, brought along the attempt to design strategies of obtaining alternative maps depicting alternative spaces. The figures and tropes of displacement occupy a central position in Rushdie's fiction as they give rise to opportunities of discussing the problematic relationship between identity and location and the tricky dichotomy centre-periphery; the exact equation place-identity was long ago broken so that new metaphors were required to translate modern and postmodern identities. Space is seen by Lyotard as "a construction of multiple locations" whereas Judith Williamson envisages it as a "construct of difference". Displacement was celebrated