Art as Technique in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh
by; Dr. Rajesh Trivedi
Associate Professor
Gyan Ganga College of Technology
Jabalpur.
Ms Namrata Soni
Assistant Professor
Gyan Ganga College of Technology
Jabalpur.
Modern paintings have always been the most
conspicuous as well as inseparably integrated aspect of the technique of
narrations of the novels of Salman Rushdie. Many critics are of the view that
the painterly imagination crept in the narrative technique of Rushdie for the
first time in his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, (1995), however, the fact
cannot be denied that since his first novel- Grimus, (1975) the
masterpieces of the painters of the first half of the century have been
contributing significantly to the narratives in delineating the meaning and
experience inherent therein. It is undisputable that the paintings come out
with great aesthetic significance in The Moor’s Last Sigh for the
obvious reason that one of the major characters of the novel is a renowned
painter, thus, the author has more specific opportunity to use paintings in the
narrative.
The influence of the surrealist masters
like Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall is more than conspicuous in the caste of
the narrative in his first novel, Grimus, which for the obvious reasons
failed to invite sufficient critical attention in the time of its publication,
yet, the fact stands beyond all questions that the novels sows the seeds of the
technical predilections of Salman Rushdie that grow into a blooming garden in
all his succeeding novels. The use of modern paintings is one such element that
makes the first spark in Grimus and continues to grow in his better
known novels. Salvador Dali is undoubtedly the most conspicuous influence in
shaping the narrative of the first novel of the master. The fictional world of Grimus
presents before us the primordial conflict between the time bound and the
timeless which has always been on the focus of the surrealist masters of the
first half of the twentieth century. The opening paragraph of the novel reminds
us of the famous painting of Salvador Dali titled The Persistence of Memory (1931)
which brings into attention the paradoxical images of the timeless and the time
bound. The eternal antithesis between the timeless and time bound becomes
clearer in Dali’s elaboration of the limp watches in the painting. ‘Like
fillets of sole,’ he comments, ‘they are destined to be swallowed by the sharks
of time.’ (quoted by Januszczak,152) it is another irnoical resemblance between
Rushdie and Dali that the same painting when remade after about a long gap to
two decades, with a new title. Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,
(1954) reminds us of the last paragraph of Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
The delineation of the Flapping Eagle, the
protagonist of the novel owes much to the surrealist fantasy of Marc Chagall. Grimus,
frequently reminds us of the images and symbols used by Marc Chagall. The use
of the ornithological images and symbols is one common aspect of the technique
used by these two great masters working on different species of
expression. The protagonist is given the
name of Eagle which further ratifies the ornithological inclinations of the
author in portraying the character of Flapping Eagle. Paris
through the Window (1913) is one of the great works of Chagall which shares
the aesthetic domain with Grimus. The painting unifies a cat with human
figure and in the perspective, depicts a flying man. The Juggler (1943)
is another painting which capitalizes the form and function of ornithological
images in order to delineate the complex idea of human predicaments. Shearer
West, commenting on this painting of Chagall, points out that Chagall’s Juggler
is both, ‘an acrobat and a rooster standing in a ring which contains Russian
village.’ It becomes clear that there is re echo of Chagall’s The Juggler
in Rushdie’s Grimus. Rushdie’s debt to Chagall becomes more obvious when
he delineates Flapping Eagle on a donkey;
The
Griibbs’ donkey, perhaps the most obedient, least mulish donkey that ever was,
jogged demurely along the cobble way with a divided Flapping Eagle upon its
back. (Rushdie, Grimus157))
The description of Flapping Eagle which makes use
of Freudian discoveries of human subconscious, reminds us of The Dream
(1927), the famous work of Marc Chagall.
The Dream (1927) having a semi nude woman figure, on the back of
a donkey, reflecting isolation and detachment.
Rushdie’s second and third novels- Midnight’s
Children (1980) and Shame (1983) are more overtly political novels
dealing chiefly with the socio- political realities of the Indian subcontinent.
The discrepancies prevailing in the socio-political set ups of India and Pakistan constitute the axis of the
dynamics of the narrative in these novels. These two masterpieces draw a very
close parallel with Picasso’s Guernica
(1937) and other canvasses painted during the late thirties in the mood of
fear, frustration and anger. Guernica is
an immediate reaction to news of destruction of the small town Guernica
near Madrid
as a result of the bombardment by the fascist forces. There is a complex array
of symbols – a bull, a horse, a distorted image of the sun, crying women and
their butchered children and a lamp. These symbols, in complementation with one
another, excite the feeling of rage, indignation, and impotent revolt. The
comparison is however questionable on the ground that the Picasso’s Guernica
is the master’s response to a single event and Midnight’s Children
and Shame (1983) are Rushdie’s response to the political processes of
Indian and Pakistan , yet the
fact cannot be denied that Guernica
foretells a gory inhuman future of mankind. ‘It constitutes,’ says Hans LC
Jaffe, ‘a warning to mankind of unleashing the forces of darkness.’ (Jaffe37)
The most obvious comparison between the works of Picasso and Rushdie is that Guernica , on
one hand and Midnight’s Children and Shame on the other hand, are
passionate and sentimental reactions to the loss of human values. Herbert Read
discussing the famous statement of Picasso that the painting is ‘an instrument
of war for attack and defense against the enemy,’ further elaborates the
implications of Picasso that ‘one must fight everything that threatens the
freedom of imagination.’ (Read160) It is obvious that the two creators had
similar intentions and they created with similar passion and conviction.
The surrealist fantasy used by Rushdie in
delineating the political characters in Midnight’s Children and Shame
owe their genesis to the surrealist masterpieces of Pablo Picasso and
Salvador Dali. The Widow is delineated with hallucination and monstrousness of
surrealist intensity;
Now one by
one the children mmff are stifled quite the Widow’s hand is lifting one by one
the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it
splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts the
children high as the sky the sky is black there are no stars the Widow laughs
her tongue is green but see her teeth are black. (Rushdie, Midnight’s
Children249)
The character of Sufiya Zinobia is
delineated through a process of surrealist fantasy. The complete perception of
the character comes only if we place the character in the context of the two
masterpieces of Salvador Dali – Premonition of Civil War (1936) and The
Young Virgin Auto Sodomized By Her Own Chastity (1954), and Pablo Picasso’s
The Weeping Woman (1937). The
three masterpieces in complementation with one another ratify and consolidate
the meaning and experience inherent in the character of Sufiya Zinobiya. The
Premonition of Civil War shows a beast distorting a woman by holding her
breast. The distortion of the woman by the beast, draws a close metaphorical
parallel with the essentials of the character of Sufiya Zinobiya delineated
with tremendous hallucination and futurism. The second Dalinean masterpiece, The
Young Virgin Auto Sodomized By Her Own Chastity portrays the idea of the
suppression of libidos that recolor the character with new metaphorical
implications that acquire graver meaning and significance in the social context
of the locale of the action. Pablo Picasso’s The Weeping Woman was
painted during the World War II and the woman in the painting comes out with
strong metaphorical suggestions of the suppression of rage and desires with futuristic
implications.
Rushdie’s fourth novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(1991), is the work done during the exile that was an aftermath of the
religious decree issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. The two characters Iff and Butt
of the novel owe their origin to the sixteen century masterpiece, Summer
(1563) by Gueseppe Arcimboldo. The masterpiece presents a human figure
visualized through cleaver artistic manipulation of fruits and vegetables. Both the characters are the impulses of
optimism that have been delineated with artistic fantasy of Acrimboldo. Iff the water genie puts a ‘purple turban on
his head,’ and ‘a baggy silk pajama gathered at the ankles’ those are
‘aubergines.’ The author reverts to Chagall in delineating the character of
Butt the Hoope which is a bird that leads all other birds to their ultimate
goal.’ (Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea
of Stories , 55) The
novel reminds us of the painting The Portrait and the Dream (1953) by
the Jackson Pollock, which presents before us a human figure with the ordered
disorder of anatomical images. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, there
is a well controlled dynamics of the fantasy in its varied forms and the reader
while reading the novel perceives the human figure that is Rushdie himself
making the backdrop and imparting the meaning.
The Moor’s Last Sigh is the sixth novel of Rushdie which was
published in the year 1996 and as usual the novel invited controversy for a
number of reasons. The most important of them was the English bulldog named
Jawahar Lal. The book was banned in India for few months and then the
circulation of the book was allowed. The use of painting in The Moor’s Last
Sigh becomes more frequent in this novel as one of the major characters of
the novel is an accomplished and widely known painter. It is another very
conspicuous aspect of the novel that the character of Aurora draws a close parallel with the
legendary painter of the first half of the century Amrita Sher Gill. She also
plays a defining role in portraying the thematic contents of the novel. Aurora
is delineated with the intensity of the surrealist paintings.
At the age
of thirteen my mother Aurora da Gama took to wandering barefoot around her
grandparents’ large odorous house on Cabral Island during the bouts of
sleeplessness, which became for a time, her nightly afflictions and on those
nocturnal odysseys she would throw open all the windows- first the inner screen
window whose fine meshed netting protected the house from midges and mosquitoes
flies next the leaded glass casements themselves and finally the slatted wooden
shutters beyond. (Rushdie, The Moor’s
Last Sigh, 07)
Aurora also served to portray the hybridization of
human race. His conjugation with Abraham is termed as ‘pepper love’ which aptly
illustrates the idea of cultural synthesis. The parallel between Amrita Sher
Gil and Aurora becomes more explicit in the light of the background and
foreground of the painter. Amrita Sher Gill was daughter of a Sikkh businessman
and a Hungarian woman. Various
biographical studies and memoirs, written on Amirta Sher Gill, ratify the
comparability that subsists between the young painting of the early twentieth
century and the painter in the novel. Mulk Raj Anand the noted fiction writer
and a contemporary of Amirta Sher Gill, writes;
Amirta Sher
Gill, born of Marie Antoinette, a cultured Hungarian mother and Sardar Umrao
Singh Gill, an aristocrat from Maiithia
family of Amritsar, was, then, like many of the new young in the intelligentsia
from big houses of that time, charged with indignation against injustice and
full of human concern. Ofcourse, she could not in the feudalistic household of
her uncle Sir Sunder Singh Majithia, Prime Minister of Patiala State, do more
than sympathize with egalitarian urges. But she was aware of the struggle for
liberation intensified by Gandhi, of whom she did sketches as he was speaking
to a mass audience and she admired Jawahar Lal Nehru, hwo reciprocated her
regards by going out of his way to meet her in Gorakhpur. (Anand02)
Anand portray the painter as young
extrovert, enthusiast with political vigilance and awareness. The most
conspicuous quality which the painter shares with her fictional counterpart,
Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh. The narrator reveals that Aurora ‘grew
into a large public figure’ and she is delineated as ‘the great beauty at the
heart of Nationalist Movement.’ Aurora’s extrovert behavior is further ratified
when the narrator portrays her as loose hair marching alongside Vallabhbhai
Patel and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad when they took out processions.’ (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh,
118) Nehru’s visit to Amrita is
recreated by Rushdie when he reciprocates the appreciation of Aurora by writing
her a letter;
My voice
is very hoarse, I don’t know why I attract these crowds. Very gratifying, no
doubt, but also very trying and often very irritating. Here in Simla I have had
to go out to the balcony and verandah frequently to give darshan. I doubt if I
shall ever be able to go out for a walk because of crowds following except at
the dead of night. (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 117-118)
Khushwant Singh, in his obituary to the
Amrita Sher Gill also expresses the similar views and presents Amrita as same
extrovert and flamboyant woman with vigilance. He writes;
I met her
only twice. But those two meetings remains imprinted in my memory. Her fame as
an artist, her glamour as a woman of great beauty which she gave credence in
some of her self portraits, and her reputation for promiscuity snowballed into
a veritable avalanche, which hasn’t ended to this day and gives me an excuse to
include her in my list. (Singh121)
Singh’s views expressed in the obituary to Amrita
Sher Gill present her a woman of fame and name, and, at the same time,
tremendous social vigilance. The verbal portrait of Amrita Sher Gill, portrayed
by her two contemporaries, when combined together, becomes identifiable with
Aurora, and, Aurora in turn emerges as the fictional equivalent of the
legendary painter of the first half of the twentieth century.
The paintings of Aurora in the novel,
unlike those of Amrita Sher Gill, owe their genesis to the masters of early
twentieth century. It is however interesting to note that not all the painting
narrated in the novel are from the works of the great masters and many of them
come out of the painterly imagination of the novelist. The Scandal
painted by Aurora is one such masterpiece which is created in words by the
narrator. The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig is one of the paintings based on
the actual incident that took place in Bombay in the third match against
Australia ‘which had not been going India’s way,’ and Baig’s half century
‘enabled the home side to force a draw.’ The narrator further reveals;
When he
reached 50, a pretty young woman ran out from the usually rather staid and
upper-crust North Stand and kissed the batsman on the cheeks. Eight runs later,
perhaps a little overcome, Baig was dismissed (C Mackay b Lindwall), but by
then the match was safe. ((Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 228)
The socio-political and cultural vigilance
is another very important aspect which makes Aurora and her art comparable with
that of many great masters of India and Europe. Picasso’s Guernica
(1937) and Dali’s irreverent delineation of Lenin in Six Apparitions of
Lenin on a Piano (1933), are the works that confirm the political vigilance
of these masters. In India M. F. Hussain has also been known for his
socio-political and cultural vigilance. His series on Mrs. Indira Gandhi,
Mother Teresa and film luminaries, Amitabh Bachchan and Madhuri Dixit, ratify his
range and vigilance.
Aurora’s Chhipkali or lizard exhibition is
dominated by animal imagery with surrealist implications. The images of snakes
and lizards and other reptiles owe its origin to the surrealist paintings of
Salvador Dali. The paintings, like The Visage of the War (1940),
make good use of such images with prophetic conviction and surrealist
intensity. The images of snakes in the works of Dali serve to excite the
feelings of fear and libidos and the fear and libidos on the paintings of
Aurora depict the fear of common man due to the oppressive policies of the
British Government and libidos at the same time can be correlated with the
character of Aurora representing the growing freedom of woman in relatively
conservative society of contemporary India. Dali while making this painting was
haunted by the images of death and destruction while the inherent implication
of fear in the lizard exhibition of Aurora can be attributed to the fear
pervading the mind of common Indian during the first four decades of the
twentieth century. ‘Spain would serve as a holocaust to that post war Europe,’
says Dali, ‘tortured by ideological dramas, by moral and artistic anxieties.’
(Descharnes96) It is understandable that Spain provides the platform to Picasso
and Dali which is comparable with fictional locale (India) of Aurora in the
novel.
Varied influences of Picasso are evidenced
in the works of Aurora created during the narrative span of the novel. One of
the most outstanding works of hers in the novel is a self portrait. The self
portrait captures our attention chiefly due to interdisciplinary technique used
by Pablo Picasso in many of his works painted during the early twenties where
the pictures in pigments impress us for their sculptural effects. Many of his famous
painting like Three Women at the Fountain (1921), Two Women Running
on the Beach (1922), Three Women at the Spring (1921), Mother
and Child (1921) etc are known for inducing sculptural effects on the
canvass with pigments. Aurora’s Self Portrait owes inspiration to
Picasso’s famous work Woman with a Fan (1906). It is remarkable that the
technique which attained its peak in twenties and even in some of the
paintings, of thirties, like Reclining Nude (1932) and Woman in the
Red Armchair (1932), of thirties, was first seen in the his work in the
early second half of the first decade of the twentieth century, little before
the Les Demoisseles D’ Avignon (1907) appeared on the horizon of fine
art and changed the history. Hans L C
Jaffe, commenting of this phase or Picasso’s creative period, rightly remarks
that it was the period when the plasticity of the bodies, their three
dimensional existence was at the center of his interest.’ (Jaffe86) In the
novel, Aurora gives the ‘anguished, magisterial, appallingly unguarded series
of late self portraits,’ and a reference to Rembrandt, credited with as many as
seventy self portraits, confirms the
super numeracy of the self portraits and a reference to Goya, a prominent
influence of Picasso reveals the essential nature of the tones and moods of the
works. The narrator details the painting and confides;
Aurora/Ayxa
sat alone on these panels beside the infernal chronicle of the degradation of
her son, and never shed a tear. Her face grew hard, even stony but in her eyes
there shone a horror that was never named as if she were looking at the things
that struck at the very depths of her soul, a thing standing before her, where
anyone looking at the pictures would naturally stand- as if the human race
itself had shown her its most secret and terrorizing face, and by doing so had
petrified her turning her old flesh into stone.
(Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh, 304)
The reference to Picasso’s Woman with a
Fan (1907) firmly reveals the transformation of the archetypal mother image
into a woman reflecting rich endurance of the vulgarity of a metropolitan city
like Bombay. An interesting contrast between the painting of Picasso and that
made by Aurora in the novel can be traced. Hans L C Jaffe commenting on this
technique of Picasso claims that ‘for all the rigidity of the structure, these
paintings clearly reflect the rest and relaxation of stay in the country.’
(Jaffe 89) It is further noticeable that the eyes in Picasso’s masterpiece are
reposed with sleep whereas the eyes of Aurora’s self portrait are painted with
an unnamed horror. Thus the eye image in the self portrait of Aurora are
suggestive of intellectual vigilance paving way for the process of realization
paradoxically leading to inert submission to the forces of history. A tacit
reference to Michael Angelo’s Pieta (1499) cannot be denied. Miriam
holding dead Christ draws a close metaphorical parallel with the self portrait
of Aurora where the physical death of the son on the lap of the mother
figuratively represents the emotional and ethical decay of Moor, the son. A
reference to Picasso’s Self Portrait (1906) painted little before Woman
with a Fan is also obligatory in which Picasso presents himself in the same
mood and tone of hard sculptural effects. The Self Portrait of Aurora in its
essence is a summation of the two works of Pablo Picasso foretelling the great
revolution in the world of art.
Aurora’s series on Moor is another very
conspicuous revelation of Rushdie’s debt to the great painters of the first
half of the twentieth century. In the early Moors, ‘the hand’ of the
protagonist was ‘transformed into a series of miracles.’ The hand image used in
the paintings titled ‘early Moor’, owe their imagistic worth to the paintings
of Salvador Dali using the image of hand painted with hallucination and
surrealist intensity. Some of the well known works of Dali using hand image,
are Apparatus and Hand (1927), The Lugubrious Game (1929) and The
Hand; Remorse (1930). The hand image of Dali is fused with the images that
have their origin in the folklore to balance the centrifugal surrealist fantasy
with centripetal primitivism. Aurora too fuses the image of peacock fused with
the hand image. ‘I was Moor as peacock, spreading my many eyed tail,’ Moor
reminisces, and ‘she painted her head on the top of a dowdy pea hen’s body.’
The transformation of the fact through reverse relation contributes
significantly to the hallucinatory effect of the narration when Aurora is
painted as ‘girlish, adorning’ and the protagonist ‘in patriarchal lapel
gripping pose, frock coated and bewhiskered like a prophecy of all-too-near
future.’ The reversal of the relation between mother and child is further
ratified by Aurora. ‘If you were twice as old as you look,’ she says, ‘and I
was half as old as I am, I could be your daughter.’ (Rushdie, The Moor’s
Last Sigh, 224) the reversal of the mother and child relation is used with
prophetic intentions as it foretells the son- Sanjay Gandhi over powering his
mother Indira Gandhi during and before the Emergency. The Shakespearean
imagination is also transformed into the artistic imagination in Aurora’s To
Die Upon a Kiss, in which Aurora portrayed herself as ‘murdered Desdemona
flung across her bed while’ Moor ‘was stabbed Othello.’ (Rushdie, The Moor’s
Last Sigh, 224-225) The reversal of the relation between mother and son at
this point of time also recreates the milieu of timelessness created in the
surrealist masterpieces of Salvador Dali and at the same time it reveals the
vulgarization of human emotions.
The second phase of Moor Paintings by
Aurora is represented principally by the picture-Mother- Naked Moor Watches
Chimene’s Arrival. It is a picture which according to the narrator owes its
inspiration to Velezquez’s Las Meninas (1656) but a closer
scrutiny of the narrator’s description reveals that the painting owes more to
Pablo Picasso’s series based on the same paintings by Velazquez. In one of
these paintings by Picasso, which falls closest to the narrator’s description
of Aurora’s painting, Picasso has shown a number of hooks that remind us of a
slaughter house; there is a grant to whose head touches the roof of the palace.
The dog of the royal family, a Cocker Spaniel, in the work of Velazquez’s Las
Meninas has been replaced by a rat. It is obvious that Picasso further
intensifies the emotion of grief and tormenting isolation as the two figures in
the background are painted in compositional semblance with a coffin. One of the
characters in the foreground is shaped as a circle while other has been painted
in typical cubistic strokes that demonstrate degradation of human values. In
Aurora’s painting the palace of the king is replaced by a chamber of Aurora’s
with sight lines. The Moor ‘stands naked in the lozenge pattern technocolour.
The giant in Picasso’s masterpiece in the verbal description of Aurora’s Mother-
Naked Moor Watches Chimene’s Arrival, is replaced by a vulture from the
tower of silence. The mouse of Picasso in Aurora’s painting is ‘nibbling
through the lacquered melon drum’ of a sitar and thus killing the possibility
of music and melody. The ‘fearsome mother Aurora in the flowing dark robes’ is
holding a full length mirror’ to his ‘nakedness.’ Aurora embodies the central
emotion of Velazquez’s Las Meninas. The three works if arranged in precise
chronology, issue forth the process of rapid vulgarization of human emotions.
‘Reality and sham reality,’ says Hans L.C. Jaffe, ‘are interlocked in
Velazquez’ masterpiece.’ (Jaffe120) The shadowy figure inon the door of the
room is replaced by glamorized Uma who ‘caste an image of Sophia Lauren in El
Cid.’ Surrealist fantasy creeps into the narrative again as ‘between the
outspread inviting hands were many marvels-golden orbs bejeweled birds, tiny
homunculi floating magically into air.’
(Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 246-247)
It is clear from the above discussion that
Rushdie recreates the magical chiaroscuro and imagistic magnificence of
Velazquez in words. It is another very note worthy aspect of the narration of
Rushdie that the recreation of Las Meninas in The Moor’s Last Sigh
is actually a step ahead of Picasso’s recreation of the original Las Meninas
painted by the seventeenth century master. The painting in the narrative
acquires special significance in the narrative in the light of Aurora- Moor relationship
which is recreated in this painting and other paintings of early Moor series as
Moor is the much desired model for his mother in most of her paintings of this
series. The view of Jaffe again invites our attention. Commenting on Picasso’s
fascination for Las Meninas, he confides;
In
addition to the painting’s Spanish character, Picasso may have been
particularly fascinated by the fact that it treats-in a brilliant mysterious
way-a problem that had often preoccupied him; the painter and his model.
(Jaffe120)
The views of Jaffe when examined in the light of
the context structured by Rushdie in The Moor’s Last Sigh make it clear
that the painting, besides constructing a bridge between India and Europe,
plays the important role of narrating a peculiar aspect of the theme of the
novel, that is the emancipation of the mother and child relation from the
cultural orthodoxy.
A discussion on the art influence on
Salman Rushdie can not be taken as complete without a reference to the works of
Bhupen Khakhar. Rushdie's oft quoted admiration for Khakhar obliges a natural
inference that the such a mega dimensional application of modern art in the
narrative is not complete without the inclusion of a work of art by Khakhar,
the master who fetched maximum accolade from Rushdie in recent years. The last
triode of the Moor Paintings by Aurora can be attributed to a famous work by
Khakhar titled You Can't Please All in which the protagonist is
positioned at an altitude watching the drama of life taking place there below.
Khakhar himself makes clear the role of painting in The Moor's Last Sigh and
says that 'the painting means a lot to,' him. 'It shows,' he further describes,
'a protagonist standing stark naked as looking daringly the world below.' The
protagonist painted in grey overtones makes clear the emotional void and
spiritual hollowness pervading around the protagonist. 'You Can't Pleas All depicts
homosexuality,' Khakhar further explains, 'but not necessarily as a central
theme.' (Khakhar02)The title of the last part of the Moor Paintings makes clear
that the Moor in Aurora's series of dark Moors can easily be identified with
the make standing naked in Khakhar's masterpiece. The painting serves to
introduce a number of disparity prevailing in the modern metropolitan set up
that constitute the character of the
protagonist of the novel. The narrator says;
The Moor
in exile sequence- the the controversial ‘dark Moors’, born of passionate irony
that had been ground down by pain, and later unjustly accused of ‘negativity’,
‘cynicism’, even ‘nihilism’-constituted the most important work of Aurora
Zogoboiby.’s later years. (Rushdie, The
Moor’s Last Sigh, 301)
The paintings in the series of Naked Moor also owe
their origin and genesis to the masterpiece of Khakhar and image of the Naked
Moor is taken straight from this masterpiece and is recreated with slight
compositional variations. Even in Mother- Naked Moor Watches Chimene’s
Arrival, the role of You Can't
Please All, (1981) cannot be denied. The image of the protagonist standing
as stark naked not only pervades the creative spirit of the milieu but also
rules over it with despotic authority. There are however some compositional
changes that have been made in narrating the paintings of the Dark Moor. The
use of collage is another very significant change introduced by the narrator as
there is no use of collage in the original painted by Khakhar. The use of
collage, on one hand, suggests the cultural synthesis of the country, and, on
the other hand, it is suggestive of the rapid vulgarization of the culture and
society. The technique of the painting narrated by the narrator lacks chastity
of the classic works of Rembrandt and Goya and even Picasso and Dali and
suffers the inclusion of modern devices of the collage that too in the style of
Dadaism. The narrator confides;
The
unifying narrator/ narrated figure of the of the Moor was usually still
presentbut was increasing characterized a jetsam, and located in an environment
of broken and discarded items , pieces of crates and vanaspati tins that were
fixed to the surface of the work and painted over. (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last
Sigh, 301)
It is obvious from the above discussion that the
modern painting is an inseparable aspect of the technique of narration employed
by Rushdie. In the first his first novel, he makes use of the works of March
Chagall in structuring the milieu defined in terms of the antithesis between
the time bound and the timeless. In the second and third novel- Midnight’s
Children and Shame the influence of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali acquires
prominence to delineate the political realities of the Indian subcontinent.
Surrealism plays a dominant role in shaping the fantasy and the interrelation
of the fantasy and prophesy further confirmed in both the novels. The Moor’s
Last Sigh is the novel with most frequent and outstanding use of paintings in
shaping the narrative. Again the role of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali
becomes prominent in the caste of the narrative. Aurora being a natural
extension of the legendary painter Amrita Sher Gill, enriches the scope of the
inclusion of the paintings in the narrative. It is a very important aspect of
the use of paintings in the narrative that these paintings play a functional
role in almost every aspect of the technical ambit of the novel. They determine
the tone of the narrator and define and meaning and experience latent there in
the narrative; they also play an important role in structuring the narrative by
paving way for the inclusion of new characters. The characterization is
undoubtedly the highly benefitted domain enjoying maximum scintillation taken
from the chiaroscuro of the masterpieces painted in the early twentieth
century.
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