The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic Nights

  • Andrew Teverson
Chapter

Abstract

In the first essay in his edited collection of meditations on nationhood, Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha includes the transcript of a lecture delivered by Ernest Renan to the Sorbonne in 1882. In this lecture, written, in part, in response to the rising threat of German nationalism in the late-nineteenth century, Renan rejects the idea that nation should be based upon racial origin (and that ‘[t]he Germanic family … has the right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the Germanic order, even when these limbs are not asking to be joined together again’) and suggests instead, that secure and stable nations are more likely to be those that have forgotten their origins.2 ‘The essence of a nation’, argues Renan,

is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth … every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of St Bartholomew … there are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.3

Notes

Keywords

Cultural Knowledge Realist Vision Idealize Vision National Narrative Narrative Collection 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1993) p. 212. All subsequent references are taken from this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882) in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8–22, at p. 13.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Ibid., p. 11.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Fredrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) in R.J. Hollingdale, trans. and ed., The Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 60.Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    Horni Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139–70, at p. 142. All subsequent references are from this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text.Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I1.23, p. 92.Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 233.Google Scholar
  8. 8.
    Ibid., p. 226.Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Ibid., p. 20.Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Salman Rushdie, ‘The Riddle of Midnight’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 26–33, at p. 32.Google Scholar
  11. 13.
    Richard Burton, trans., A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, now Entitled: the Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, 10 vols, (Kamashastra: Benares, 1885), vol. 1, p. 166.Google Scholar
  12. 14.
    Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ in Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1984), pp. 42–57, at pp. 45–6. Foucault has a similar, but subtly different conceit. He suggests that the extra night of the Thousand and One Nights ‘is one night too many … a thousand would have been enough’. This one night too many, for Foucault, becomes ‘the fatal space in which language speaks of itself.’ See Michel Foucault, ‘Language to Infinity’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 53–67, at p. 58.Google Scholar
  13. 16.
    Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1986), p. 24.Google Scholar
  14. 17.
    Ibid., p. 23.Google Scholar
  15. 18.
    Ibid., p. 25.Google Scholar
  16. 19.
    William Beckford, Vathek in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 149–255, at p. 243. Henry Maty, A New Review, June/July 1786; quoted in Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’ to Vathek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xx.Google Scholar
  17. 21.
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 1., ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 347.Google Scholar
  18. 22.
    Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 69.Google Scholar
  19. 23.
    Bram Stoker, Dracula (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 42.Google Scholar
  20. 27.
    Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian Maclean (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). The Manuscript remained incomplete at Potocki’s death in 1815. Portions of it were published in 1805, 1814 and 1815. The first modern edition appeared in French in 1989.Google Scholar
  21. 28.
    Salman Rushdie, ‘What are you Reading Currently’, in the Guardian G2T (9 June 1995), p. 4. Rushdie had not read the novel until the appearance of the full English translation in 1995, though he claims to have been interested in it since he saw a Polish film version when at Cambridge.Google Scholar
  22. 30.
    For instance, they are implicit in Stephen Baker’s recent discussion of the issue in The Fiction of Postmodernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). ‘Rushdie’s writing’, Baker argues, ‘seems unable to escape the discourse of Orientalism’ (p. 170) but ‘… it is as though [it] … were to exist at a slight angle to Orientalist practice, neither quite fitting in nor fully divorced’ (p. 171).Google Scholar
  23. 31.
    Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. H.D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Merrill, 1955), p. 11. All subsequent references are taken from this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text.Google Scholar
  24. 32.
    Doanld Pease, ‘Sublime Politics’, in Mary Arensberg, ed., The American Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 21–9 at p. 21. Quoted in Mishra, The Gothic Sublime, p. 28.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2003

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  • Andrew Teverson

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