In the time of the one-party system, it was difficult to discuss Swift’s satire of the struggling political parties in the Voyage to Lilliput of his Gulliver’s Travels without a previous discussion of the different aspects of multi-party systems. The sense-making efforts of some students got lost in speculations about the impact of heels on higher viewpoints and other far-fetched circumstances that could explain animosities between the High-Heels and their opponents. The incomprehensibility of Swift’s satire for some of the pre-1991 students fully dawned on me when one of my former students told me that watching our current Slovene party struggles on TV always reminded her of the discussion of Gulliver’s Travels in the seminar on the English novel.
[taken from: de Beaugrande, Robert; Grosman, Meta; Seidlhofer, Barbara (Eds.) Language Policy and Language Education in Emerging Nations - Focus on Slovenia and Croatia. beaugrande@terra.com.br]
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In Haroun, Rushdie evidences the influence of the British canon, namely Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), in style and structure, but, unlike those two writers, Rushdie transforms the genre by mixing in non‐European narrative forms and by placing both on equal footing. Teverson suggests that
Rushdie’s fantasy, by contrast, demonstrates a resistance to the tradition’s exclusive reliance on European narrative forms and European modes of perception b taking this tradition, saturated in British folklore and fairytale, and merging it with an equivalent tradition in Indian storytelling that derives from Indic, Persian or Arabic oral and literary sources (2001: 454).
Swift and Carroll also incorporate elements from other literary sources but treat them as stereotypes of the orientalist traditon. “Orientalism” is another much debated concept created and presented to the public by Edward Said in 1978, in a book by the same title (E. Said. 1978. Orientalism, New York, Random House), where this critic describes the train of thought, processes of investigation and institutions whereby the Western world came to know and categorize the Orient; it is a discourse where the Occident gets to know itself by categorizing and studying the orient. In Edward Said’s own words, Orientalism is defined as being the distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction ( the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which (…) it not only creates but also maintains: it is, (…) a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (…) world: it is (…) produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political ( as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (…) power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values) (1978: 88).
However, according to Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, Orientalism is principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others. But as a group of related disciplines Orientalism was (…) about Europe itself, and hinged on arguments that circulated around the issue of national distinctiveness, and racial and linguistic origins (1999: 50‐51).
It is against this “power cultural” (sic) that Salman Rushdie fights by intertwining both oriental and occidental traditions in Haroun and “contrapuntally” showing how interdependent these two “unequal halves” are of each other.
[taken from: The Aesthetics of (re)Presenting Ethics Through Narrative in: https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/
1822/6472/4/2.%20Representation
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Narrative.pdf]
