الفهرس 
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Abstract
The study entitled, “A Postmodern Reading of the Representation of History in Selected Novels by Salman Rushdie” investigates Rushdie’s concept of History and the crisis of representation in his novels. As a postmodernist, Rushdie problematizes the representation of history in his novels. Mainly, his major concern is not the loss or lack of history but the abundant variety of realities that shape history. So, readers encounter histories not history owing to the multiplicity, fragmentation and hybridity as the natural components of “reality”. Hence, it is impossible to find unitary, total and single entities such as “reality”, “truth” and “meaning”. Thus, in his novels, we find histories, but not history, that are opened up to a limitless variety of possibilities and interpretation.
This study consists of: an introduction and four chapters dealing with the following novels; Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995).
Chapter one: “Postmodern Aesthetics and Chutni- fication of History”. It is through the metaphor of chutnif- ication that Rushdie is able to communicate his notion of representation of history. This chapter investigates how Rushdie uses the postmodern aesthetics of narration: multiple perspectives, fragmented narration, transgression of spatio-temporal boundaries, blurring boundaries of fact and fiction, non-linearity and non-closure, to represent the history of India in Midnight’s Children. The novel interrogates historical truth, the nature of reality and how to preserve history if human memory is unreliable and distorting device. Saleem Sinai’s representation of history dismantles any notion of a unified, totalized and single meaningful reality. By merging fact and fiction, by recalling histories through fragments of memory, and by representing histories as personal version, Rushdie, through his narrator, dismantles historical truth, authenticity, authority, objectivity and reliability of the narrator. The multiple narrative perspectives used in Midnight’s Children and fragmentation of self, body and narration ensure the multiplicities of realities and truths. The chutnification of history refers to the unreliability of memory to retain history’s fragments; a metaphor that refers to Rushdie’s concept of history as fragmented, subjective, multiple and ever-changing.
Chapter two: “The Unresolved Contradictions and the Representation of History in Shame”, provides another perspective on Rushdie’s concept of history and the way it is presented. History in Shame becomes a text written between the folds of fact and fiction, history and imagination; a perspective based on contradictory doubleness. Rushdie, here, subverts the “official” version of history through the dialogic negotiation between unresolved contradictions: shame/ shamelessness, fact/fiction, periphery/centrality, private/public and the migrant’s loss of identity and lack of history versus the migrant’s enabling double vision. On two levels of ontologisms, Rushdie represents the history of Pakistan; the factual political rivalry between the two despots and the fictional and peripheral female stories of violence and oppression. As in earlier novel, Shame problomatizes the representation of history through off-centring postmodern strategies and techniques.
Chapter three: “The Metamorphosis of the Self and the Deconstruction of Metanarrative in The Satanic Verses” traces the relationship between the individual and history through the process of metamorphosis of the migrant’s self who is borne across countries, cultures, languages and time. This proves that identity has such unstable nature, that it is ever-shifting and changing, and that culture also is a hybrid thing and never pure and single. The novel’s postmodern aesthetics aim at deconstructing the metanarrative of ideological and religious absolutism, affirming that reality and truth are multiple and never of single meaning. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha; the two protagonists in The Satanic Verses are immigrants who suffer a crisis of identity as both failed to integrate their past into the present. Chamcha rejects his past, and holds his present, Farishta, on the other hand, escapes through his dreams into the past. In this novel, the self and history have never been so powerful in affinity; fragmentation and multiplicity of the selves also create multiplicity of reality, and this results in multiple perspectives of reality/history. The new variation in the theme of representing history in The Satanic Verses is the creation of history through dreams; Gibreal’s dreams become a sourceful store of the history of Islam. The new version of Islam is produced ironically through Gibreel who lost faith in Islam. These dreams become the most postmodern techniques that stress the sense of indeterminacy, uncertainty and contradiction that govern the narration of history. Like the earlier novels, The Satanic Verses employs postmodern dislodging or off-centring strategies and techniques in representing the alternative version of history. The chapter examines these strategies as related to the representation of history.
Chapter four: “Palimpsestic Aesthetics and the Representation of History in The Moor’s Last Sigh” provides a variation so significant in representing history. It is the visual arts’ aesthetics that provide the central metaphor in The Moor’s Last Sigh. The novel traces the historical transformation in India during the 1980s and 1990s; from the pluralistic view into a fundamental and intolerant one. Bombay, the iconic capital of multiculturalism and pluralism becomes under the sway of the Hindu nationalist who turned it into the battlefield of religious disputes and political rivalry. Hindu nationalism with its exclusive and authentic notions of the nation is criticized in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Thus, real and fictional levels are intersected and paralleled in The Moor’s Last Sigh as in earlier novels by Rushdie. The central metaphor of the palimpsest shows that identity, culture and history are hybrid constructs. Through this dominating metaphor, Rushdie refutes the Hindus’ discourse of authenticity by affirming that layers over layers of races, cultures, and histories shape India, and this deconstructs the myth of Mother India which exclusively considers Hindus alone the ‘Children of the Land’