The Moor's Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh revolves around the Moor who needs to record his genealogical history in order to survive at a madman's castle and restore his mother's reputation. While re-telling his family's story that originated in Granada, parallel to the history of post-independence India, the Moor makes use of his mother Aurora's magical realist paintings that combine official History with individual histories. Aurora, the oppressive mother figure, dominates the Moor's narrative through her paintings entitled "The Moor Cycle" and manipulates his story-telling and identity-formation process. In "The Moor Cycle" paintings, she extols the Moor's deformed body and associates him with the last Sultan Boabdil of Granada. Reshaping the flow of history, the mother-son relationship and its dynamics are as important as the historical backdrop of the narrative. This parallelism between individual histories and the history of India necessitates an allegorical reading, which gives the key role to 'Aurora the mother.' Rushdie's choice of Aurora as the main source of his postmodern narrative and her haunting influence on the Moor's identity-formation echo the Mother India myth promoted during the Indian nation-building process. The love-hate relationship between the Moor and Aurora, and its effecs on the Moor's identity will be analyzed by referring to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Rushdie's association of magical realism with the maternal semiotic chora, his metaphorical use of the Moor's grotesque body and the abject figures' potential of breaking the world order based on the law of the father will also be highlighted within the framework of Kristeva's theory. Therefore, Aurora's paintings will be read as a feminine form of history-writing that challenges the paternal discourse that writes the official History.

Byron's early letters, from the time he left Cambridge and had not yet embarked on his Grand Tour of Europe, show that he was looking for ways to earn some money, possibly to finance a political career. He thought of going to India where a small investment would bring him huge returns. But he needed the Prime Minister's permission to enter India. Accordingly, he wrote to the Duke of Portland. Other than knowing that he could become rich in India, his ideas about the place were very hazy. How did he plan to travel to India? Overland? By sea? What route would he take not only to India but--and this is truly mysterious--from India to central Asia. What did he mean by central Asia? And did he really think that there was a clear and easy way from India into whatever he thought of as central Asia? Which maps did he consult? A close reading of his letters of this period helps to unravel some of these mysteries.

The paper exemplifies what "metautobiographicity" is. The exemplification rests on the argument that "The text cannot exist without aspects of the author. The text without aspects of its author is a glitch. Even a fragment a literary glossolalia in a mature work or a text an unconcerned dialogue, or awkward situation to the narration or story, subjoins the mind of the author." The author justifies his argument saying that "The Enchantress of Florence is the result of fuzzy narrative technique. However, Rushdie narrates the story and let one of his narrators of that very story to tell his story. Rushdie's creative leitmotif unties the Rushdie at each narrative mystification."