Filozofická fakulta

4.2. Shame – Fiction versus Reality

The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan (Rushdie 1995-II, 29).

Rushdie’s third novel (but second to be appreciated by readers and critics) Shame was brought out in 1983. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and expected to win but it did not. It is not a well-known fact that this book was also (as well as The Satanic Verses later) banned in Pakistan for its religious issues. It can be said that Shame is a political novel comparing the real situation in Pakistan with a fictional country with obvious connections to reality. It is usually described as a satire and political allegory targeting Pakistan’s ruling classes (Brennan).

In this novel the use of magic realism is very evident and significant. Rushdie is careful in criticizing the political situation and that is why he does not do it straightforwardly but rather “invents” a fictional state. While claiming that he is writing a story about a fictional country he can put in it magic and miracles because they are believed to happen in such a kind of place. The author often enters the story to explain why is he writing a fantasy and not a realistic novel. It seems that he does it to confirm the idea that he is really not writing about Pakistan. He supports his assertion by logical reasoning – there would not be any magical events in a realistic novel but rather ordinary things concerning real people. “If this were a realistic novel about Pakistan, I would not be writing about Bilquis and the wind; I would be talking about my youngest sister. Who is twenty-two, and studying engineering in Karachi [...]” (Rushdie 1995-II, 68).

As far as magic realism is concerned, there is again the idea (as in Midnight’s Children) that “many of the [magic-realistic] texts take a position that is antibureaucratic, and so they often use their magic against the established social order“ (Zamora 179). This is exactly the case of Shame where Rushdie is criticizing the ruling power of Pakistan. On the other hand, I would not say that this novel is only about politics. As Rushdie’s other novels, it depicts a detailed history of two families and the magic and miracles connected with them. As the title suggests the main theme or notion is shame in all its different forms. At first sight it seems that the embodiment of shame into a mentally affected girl Sufiya Zinobia has nothing in common with the political situation of a nation. In fact, shame or sharam, a “quality only loosely translatable as ‘shame’ or ‘moral consciousness’” (Gosh-Schellhorn), is very much linked to Pakistan (according to Rushdie).

I would say that from the magic-realist point of view the personification of the shame related to the family history is more important since the miracles and magic often happen to quite ordinary people (living rather in a rural setting than in the city). The conception of shame is omnipresent throughout the whole story. Essentially, the shame in itself is ever-present also in real life. “Whenever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed. But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture” (Rushdie 1995-II, 28). At the beginning, the shame appears in quite a ‘real’ situation. Bilquis (the future mother of Sufiya) is running along the street naked and later is rescued by her future husband Raza Hyder. From that point she cannot dispose of the thought of shame for all her life. Therefore when she gave birth to a daughter who is retarded, Bilquis is not able to put up with it and somehow ‘shifts’ all her shame to Sufyia. Literally speaking she gets rid of her responsibility. Literality is an important notion as far as magic realism is concerned. The magic is often inherent in the literalization of metaphor; when the metaphor is made real, the magic mingles with the reality (Zamora 176). And thus Sufyia Zinobia carries the burden of her family’s and in general of the nation’s shame. This personification expresses itself in the form of Sufyia’s excessive blushing. Even at the moment she was born she blushed. The blushing itself would not be very interesting, because that happens in real life quite often. In magic realism “the real as we know it may be made to seem amazing or even ridiculous” (Zamora 168). That is why the instance of excessive blushing is even further exaggerated – “[…] the ancient lady bent to kiss the girls and was alarmed to find that her lips had been mildly burned by a sudden rush of heat to Sufyia Zinobia’s cheek. […] complained on her first day that when she gave Sufyia Zinobia a bath the water had scalded her hands, having been brought close to boiling point by a red flame of embarrassement […]” (Rushdie 1995-II, 121). The blushing was so extreme because the shame was so immense. The personified shame took on her all the vices of her family and thereby her strenght became supernatural and she is able to kill people. Subsequently, her parents realize what they did to her and are afraid of her and begin to avoid her (as they do with their own shame). “[…] nobody’s hands were clean. They were all accomplices in the matter of Sufyia Zinobia; and the secret was kept” (Rushdie 1995-II, 237).

In this novel there are more magic-realist features than only the personification of the shame. Some of them are very interesting and narrated in a matter-of-fact way by the reason that magic and miracles occur matter-of-factly without any unnecessary commentary. At the same time the magic is comical and smart. In Shame there is for example a man, who “had the ability of speaking in capital letters” (Rushdie 1995-II, 49). Nobody is surprised by his competence and the author presents it as if it was the most normal thing in the world. It is just a description of one man’s nature. That is probably the reason why this ability is not further specified or explained – it is not essential for the story and also nothing to be surprised of. There are more instances of this as if ‘realistic magic’. Its role is not as significant as in the case of the personification of shame that goes throughout the whole novel. But yet these ‘petty miracles’ compose the compact portrait of the place and time.

Among the everyday magic³ there are other situations that leave the reader in doubt whether this can really happen and why. Mostly it depends on the culture from which the reader comes since in different cultures the same things are differently perceived. Generally speaking “narrators of magic realism play confidence tricks on their readers“ (Zamora 235). They want the reader to believe in everything they claim to happen in their fictious world; “that the natural order of things can be subverted in the world of her or his fiction“ (Zamora 235). The authors (or author in this case) achieve this ‘trickery’ on the reader by inserting extraordinary incidents into an otherwise real⁴ story. In this novel there is one extraordinary event that surprised me and it is the incident of multiple pregnancy. Year after year the sister of Sufyia called Good News gave birth to children whose number was higher every year. “Good News gave birth to fine, healthy twin sons […]. Exactly one year later she became a mother again; this time she produced triplets. […] Five more […] turned up one year later to the day. […] and that next year there would be nine, and after that ten, and so on, so that by her thirtieth birthday she would have given birth to no fewer than seventy-seven children” (Rushdie 1995-II, 206, 226). The image of multiple pregnancy as well as other surreal accidents has been quite common in magic-realist texts since its beginning. The famous magic-realist author Gabriel García Márquez employed this kind of magic quite often in his novels and Rushdie is sometimes said to be very much influenced by Márquez’s writing.

An interesting element of this novel and in fact one of the connecting points of the three novels in question is ‘duality’. As we could see in Midnight’s Children Saleem’s alter-ego Saleem’s was the evil Shiva. And as we will see in the chapter about The Satanic Verses this duality is even more obvious in the case of Gibreel and Saladin. In Shame the opposition is not as evident as in the other novels – army general Raza Hyder and civilian politician Iskander Harrappa. This duality of characters has its origin in mythology and religion; there has always been antagonism between good and evil. Magic realism is very much connected with a nation’s mythology and religion. Most of the miracles (ghosts, metamorphoses) come from the mythology and tradition. On the duality of characters that represent two sides of one coin – good and evil inseparable – Rushdie quite openly satirizes the society and politics of a nation. Openly in the sense that he of course uses the features of magic realism and the characters mentioned are only based on the real people.

As well as in Midnight’s Children also in Shame there is apparent the image of mirrors. In the texts of magic realist authors they usually represents the division between two worlds, “the magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions” (Zamora 172). These two worlds can be either ‘real’ and ‘magic’ or the world of the ‘dead’ and the ‘living’. Both these different worlds are represented by mirrors in magic realism. The image of mirrors (broken or unbroken) is repeated several times in the novel, since “repetition [...] in conjunction with mirrors [...] creates a magic of shifting references” (Zamora 177). In Shame looking into a mirror symbolizes mostly looking in one’s past as well as looking into the ‘other’ world. “When she heard this Bilquis set her lips in a tight and bloodless smile, and her eyes stared ferociously through the mirror on the wall which divided her from the empires of her past” (Rushdie 1995-II, 92).

Interestingly, there are several miracles and magic that appear in all three novels examined. These are mainly the miracles that are very ‘unreal’ and can only emerge in the works of magic realism or fairy tales. Dreams, ghosts, angles and devils are included in all three novels. The dreams are very vivid and contain events and accidents that would be otherwise unbelievable. In Shame Sufyia imagines in her dream the metamorphoses of her nanny and her husband into fishes. There is also the angel-devil relationship and metamorphosis into an angel – themes that are essential to The Satanic Verses and figuratively appear in Midnight’s Children. In Shame Omar’s brother who lives in the mountains with the guerillas turned into an angel before he died. “[...] their bearded comrade’s skin had begun to give off a yellow light; the little buds of new wings were visible on his shoulders. It was transformation familiar to the denizens of the Impossible Mountains” (Rushdie 1995-II, 132). This quotation shows that the metamorphosis was quite an ordinary event for the countrymen. Even for the three mothers (another magic-realist element) of Omar and his brother it was nothing to be surprised of. They as if expected it to happen that way and at the end they say to Omar: “ ‘Your brother’s father was an archangel,’ Chhunni Shakil whispered at his bedside, ‘so the boy was too good for this world. But you, your maker was a devil out of hell’” (Rushdie 1995-II, 278). This depicts the allegory of the angel-devil relationship and also another instance of the ‘duality’ mentioned above.

Shame is probably the most political novel of the three, still at the same time it is probably the best example of the main feature of magic realism – the mingling of reality and fiction (or magic). Rushdie artfully reflects the real political situation in Pakistan by creating a fictional country of his own where all the miracles and magic can definitely happen.

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