The Palimpsest Narrator: The Hybridized Nature of the Inadequate Storyteller in Devi’s “Pterodactyl” and Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh
I. Introduction: The Palimpsest
According to my trusty Random House College Dictionary, a palimpsest is “a parchment or the like from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text., from Greek palimpsestos, rubbed again.” This definition assumes that there is an original text, an original text which the next writer sees as unimportant or irrelevant for the newer, incoming text. But what about the previous writer and his previous words, his knowledge, his insights? They become of no consequence to the next writer, who sees the prior text as having no place in the new order of things, in the new knowledge set forth upon older knowledge, older stories, older histories, rubbed out. With a sure, strong hand, the new writer erases the old, like just so much trash, creating swatches of wide, clean, blank space in his wake.
But, as anybody can attest who has tried to completely erase something, a little bit of the old remains, stubbornly on the paper. Diminished, yes, perhaps rubbed deep down so that nobody can see it very well, yes, but like magnetic remnants of a deleted file or the imprints of a dinosaur footprint, partially filled with sandstone, one can never totally erase the past. The prior text peeps through the new, even if only for a second and even if only to the one who is really looking. But because the older text peeps through the new, the new text becomes an overlay of the old such that if one tries to read the old text, one also reads a little of the new, and vice versa. It is like trying to read a letter while it is still in its envelope, and the envelope itself also has writing on it. Thus the palimpsest becomes like Humpty Dumpty’s portmanteau word: “there are two meanings packed up into one word” (Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 164). In the case of the palimpsest, there are at least three meanings packed up into the text: the prior meaning, the new meaning, and the hybrid creation when reading the prior with the new. But, of course, such fine distinctions are misleading because the palimpsest is more complex than simply “prior, new, hybrid” because what is prior and what is new is mixed together into the hybrid.
So, the palimpsest, ultimately, is not only a linguistic and creative hybrid as such, but is also a metaphor for the cultural, political, and sociohistorical manifestation called hybridity. The term hybrid, of course, has its basis in biology, describing the offspring of two heterogeneous animals or plants, different in race, breed, species, etc. But in terms of culture, hybrid means the product of the interaction of two or more unlike cultures or traditions. The hybrid can be people, can be history, can be anything at all. But the process of hybridity begins with the two heterogeneous sources of cultural identity, divided from each other by the wide gap of cultural difference.
To indicate this difference, most discursive analyses of hybridity separate the two heterogeneous sources of identity into the Other for the prior culture (similar to the older text of the palimpsest metaphor) and the Self, or Same, for the new, incoming culture (similar to the new text written over the old). Note that Same and Other are psychological terms denoting the phenomenon of identity/non-identity, and so the terms themselves are interchangeable depending on the subject, i.e. who is looking. In describing cultural difference, however, one realizes that the terms are more rigid than the pure psychological usage because of the material reality of colonialism. The dominant, Western culture of the colonizer only sees itself as Same as it casts any foreign culture it encounters as Other. The colonizer’s hegemony of knowledge does not allow the interchangeability of the terms Same and Other as one sees in psychology because the colonizer never sees itself as an Other to the colonized eye. Thus, Same and Other are rigid terms in cultural difference until the process of hybridity occurs -- then, like deconstructionist essays, free interactions of the two heterogeneous sources of identity occur, and Same and Other become mingled. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Most discursive analyses of hybridity, then, center upon the hybridized Object, or Other, as the crux of the cross-cultural relation of Same (eg., white, male, colonizer, First World, Christian) and Other (e.g., color, female, colonized, Third World, infidel). But as proposed in the nature of hybridity, both sides of the relationship, Same and Other, influence each other, although to what degree is a topic for debate. According to critic Homi Bhabha in “The Commitment to Theory,” this exchange is a negotiation between cultural difference of what can be known from one and the other in the formation of cultural knowledge. Because “meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” (Bhabha, “Commitment to Theory,” 130), the outcome of a cross-cultural exchange is ambivalent and multiple. What Bhabha is saying, essentially, is that the two heterogeneous sources of identity, the Same and Other, are already hybrids, that pure identity is a myth, and that their interaction with one another is a continuation of this on-going process of hybridity, a fine-tuning and enhancement of the hybrid and thus fluid status of the Same and Other, as it were.
Keeping the dynamic, fluid nature of the Same and Other in mind, the Same, i.e., the West, in understanding the “Orient” has been affected by the very Other it has tried to categorize and render known by the Western hegemony of the scientific mode of study. Granted, the West does not really understand the “Orient” through Western hegemony, but the West’s awareness of “Oriental” difference has already given the West the beginning of the hybrid relationship to come. Robert Young, in his critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, points out the irony of Western hegemony:
If Orientalism involves a science of inclusion and incorporation of the East by the West, then that inclusion produces its own disruption: the creation of the Orient, if it does not really represent the East, signifies the West’s own dislocation from itself, something that is presented, narrativized, as being outside.
(Young, White Mythologies, 139)
This “dislocation” is the West’s awareness of its role in hybridity. Similarly, the East feels a similar dislocation, as Bhabha states:
This ambivalent identification of the racist world... turns on the idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the ‘Otherness’ of the Self I inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.
(Young, White Mythologies, 153)
Bhabha’s statement brings us back to the palimpsest metaphor of cultural hybridity.
Thus, the process of hybridity in regards to the Same already “knowing” the Other before an in-depth cross-cultural exchange occurs is Edward Said’s Orientalism inverted: The Same, in approaching the Other, has pre-conceived ideas of the Other (thanks to Western hegemonic, representational practices). But in delving deeper into the culture of the Other, the Same realizes that he has no real (i.e., scientific) knowledge of the Other at all. Lacking factual knowledge of each other, the Same and Other interact imaginatively, intuitively, in order to form imaginative knowledge of each other.
This imaginative exchange is akin to Bhabha’s “Third space” of cultural hybridity in which the Same and Other meet in a discursive and cultural space which is neither Same and Other. The Third space is like the two parts of the palimpsest, coming together to create the hybrid palimpsest, which is greater in scope and imagination than its parts. This process of imaginative exchange is an old and, perhaps, universal action in human nature -- as aforementioned, Same and Other become interchangeable in the process of hybridity, and the specific becomes universal in its hybridity. Perhaps it is a universal, human drive to explain the unknown in his own imaginative terms, giving rise to stories. Of course, the knowledge gained in such stories is an incomplete knowledge because the shapers of these stories, the storytellers, do not fully know their subjects in a factual, lived-in-his-shoes way. But such an interchange of imaginative makes each side more aware of each other, which is greater than mere factual knowledge, hybridity occurs, and the storytellers become a part of the hybrid palimpsest -- they become a part of the story.
II. The Storytellers
For my examples of the palimpsest storyteller, I turn to Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha” in the collection Imaginary Maps and Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. I use these two literary texts because they both display differing degrees of the palimpsest narrator: Puran Sahay in “Pterodactyl” becomes aware of his own hybridity -- his ambivalent Same role -- as he interacts with an Other, India’s tribals, i.e., Bikhia. The reader sees Puran in the beginning of his awareness of his cultural hybridity. On the other hand, Moraes Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh is fully aware of his cultural hybridity -- he is steeped in it like old Ceylon tea. Unlike Puran, the reader sees Moraes in the end of his hybrid life. These two texts provide the reader the alpha and omega points of the development of awareness of hybridity in the palimpsest narrator, as seen in Puran and Moraes.
Puran is a palimpsest on many fronts. His full name is Prarthana Puran, “Prayer Fulfillment” because he is the only son; but “‘Prarthana’ becomes a woman’s name” independent from “Puran” (Devi, Imaginary Maps, 96), which suggests an implied hybridity in his gender identity. In fact, when his wife Archana dies, Puran does not remarry (Devi, 96); very odd for a man, but not unusual for a widow. Puran sees himself as “half-human” precisely because he cannot remarry, because he does not participate in the man/woman binary and as “a male of the species, does not make his masculinity felt in harsh words” (Devi, 97). His awareness of his “half human” state indicates an inkling of his own hybrid nature -- in this case, neither woman nor man -- which prepares Puran for his journey to the tribals at Pirtha. Because Puran is a gender palimpsest, a hybrid of Same (male) and Other (female), he is already predisposed to the cultural hybridity of which he will become aware at Pirtha.
Also, Puran is “a journalist, ex-social worker, and independent” (Devi, 96). As a journalist, Puran writes stories that are “sort of a mixed chow mein dish” (Devi, 97): serious with the frivolous, objective with the activist. Although Puran insists that he only believes in “today’s reality” (Devi, 108), Puran’s “chow mein” writing keeps him open to other realities -- e.g., the mystery of the pterodactyl -- realities which his empirical, journalist’s sense may not understand but nevertheless haunts his imagination, his dreams:
In his sleep the men and women of the cave paintings dance. In his sleep a shadow flies floating. No, this incident is not of the type where I come, I see, I take some notes for writing a report, I record some voices on tape. How about staying on a bit? I must write to Saraswati if I can. Thirty-two is not old. Yet in his dream the men and women of the cave paintings keep dancing and Puran asks Saraswati, Will you dance? (Devi, 107)
Even before Puran arrives at Pirtha and stays with the tribals to document these Others, the tribals themselves and the pterodactyl, Puran is already imaginatively drawn to the tribals’ reality, in their cave paintings and dance. As seen in the above passage, Puran’s own life, i.e., his troubled relationship with his fiancee’ Saraswati, becomes mingled with the life of the cave paintings, and he becomes another -- an Other -- dancer.
Puran arrives at Pirtha as a Hindu outsider, a journalist to document the mystery in Pirtha. But he is aware of the empirical, communicative gap between himself and the tribals, these ancient Others:
(T)he experience is a million moons old, when they did not speak Hindi... There are no words in their language to explain the daily experience of the tribals in today’s India. There are no words for “exploitation” or “deprivation” in the Ho language. There was an explosion in Puran’s head that day. (Devi, 118)
This “explosion” is the resurgence of awareness of his inaccessibility as a journalist to understand the tribals and the mystery which is the pterodactyl. This “explosion” is the mind-clearing of his hegemonic, scientific-documentation ways in order to encounter a reality that is beyond his identity as Puran, Hindu journalist. After the “explosion” Puran meets Bikhia, a boy who has discovered the pterodactyl and is its witness, engraving the image of the pterodactyl into stone for all others to see. Like Puran, Bikhia is a scriptor of reality -- in this case, the pterodactyl -- so Bikhia is Puran’s counterpart, his Other. Not surprisingly, Puran cannot communicate with Bikhia because Bikhia literally will not speak. “Bikhia is mute after setting down the unquiet soul of the ancestors. He can speak. He won’t.” (Devi, 128) Bikhia bars the usual, pragmatic mode of communication -- human language -- in order for Puran to seek another mode of communication, a communication that does not involve cameras and tape recorders (Devi, 135), a communication which begins with the admission that Puran does not understand what he sees when he sees the pterodactyl but can only accept its existence and its unknown influence on himself as a witness of this reality that is beyond Puran’s empirical understanding.
The rains came riding on cold winds that night.
And, when the rain symphony was at its peak, then into Puran’s room came the soul of the ancestor of Shankar’s people... From the other side of millions of years the soul of the ancestor of Shankar’s people looks at Puran, and the glance is so prehistoric that Puran’s brain cells, spreading a hundred antennae, understand nothing of that glance.
...No, nothing must be said. It wants refuge with Puran. Puran cannot betray this, for any reason at all. (Devi, 141-142)
What is going on here? Puran sees the pterodactyl, sees the impossible before his eyes, and his mind is incapable of understanding how this creature is able to live -- pterodactyls have been extinct for millions of years! -- where it came from, why it is here, in Pirtha, in the present. Puran cannot answer these questions, but he knows, imaginatively, and intuitively, that he must leave the pterodactyl alone, not “betray” this impossible reality, and, in realizing this, in meshing his sense of reality with the pterodactyl, Puran joins his Other, Bikhia, and he is able to communicate with him:
Someone holds his hand.
Bikhia.
...Puran keeps looking at him. At least he’s not alone now, Bikhia shares the intolerable burden of his explosive discovery. (Devi, 142-43)
But as seen earlier, this “explosive discovery” is just the “explosion in Puran’s head” made into flesh. In other words, Puran was already Bikhia and Bikhia Puran, hybrid witnesses, or storytellers, of the mystery of the pterodactyl. And just like Bikhia’s cave paintings of the pterodactyl will become legend in the tribal myths, “Puran now realizes that the rainfall on the night of his arrival (Pirtha has been in a drought before Puran’s arrival) might give rise to another legend;” “now a story will be put together from voice to voice, the story will become song...and the song will enter the history that they hold in their oral tradition.” (Devi, 144, 145) Puran, the man who “came to Pirtha having read many books and done a lot of homework” (Devi, 183), becomes a part of the greater hybrid palimpsest that is Pirtha and her stories not by his own knowledge but by accepting the palimpsestic overlay of the pterodactyl.
Says Spivak in her Afterword of Imaginary Maps,
I have no doubt that we must learn to learn from the original practical philosophers of the world, through the slow, attentive, mind-changing (on both sides) ethical singularity that deserves the name ‘love’.” (Devi, 201)
Puran, the Hindu outsider who does not know that he is already a hybrid, and Bikhia, a hybrid tribal because he feels himself in two different histories -- the history of the present-day tribals and the beyond-pre-history of the pterodactyl (Devi, 181) -- are able to communicate in the mythical level by becoming witnesses of the pterodactyl, knowledge beyond Puran’s journalistic understanding but not beyond his imaginative inkling of understanding. Puran does not know the full story of the pterodactyl, and, as he admits, he is incapable of ever knowing the full story (Devi, 180). But at least he realizes the story is there, and, as a witness, this story affects him, shaping his ideas and imagination: “Now Puran’s amazed heart discovers what love for Pirtha there is in his heart, perhaps he cannot remain a distant spectator anywhere in life” (Devi, 196). Thus, like, Bikhia, Puran the hybrid storyteller shares this “explosive discovery” and “picks up his pen” (Devi, 186), arriving to the full awareness of his cultural hybridity.
While Puran becomes aware of his cultural hybridity, Moraes Zogoiby is fully aware of his hybridity. In fact, there is nothing about Moraes that is NOT hybrid, a product of the palimpsestic mixture which is India. Moraes has Jewish, Moorish, and Portuguese blood in him, His family, the da Gama-Zogoiby line, traces its lineage to High Renaissance Spain, when that country, in its height of nationalism, expelled all non-Christian, non-Spaniards out of Spain and then sent out its explorers to search for the spice trade road to the Orient, traveling West to East and encountering India. I quote the Random House Guide:
...his mother, India’s greatest artist, comes from a Portuguese line descended on the wrong side of the sheet from Vasco da Gama, while his father is one of the ancient community of Cochin Jews, and is also an illegitimate descendent -- possibly -- of Boabdil, the last Moorish Sultan of Granada, expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. (http://www.randomhouse.com/site/rushdie/rgg.html)
But even with these Western parts of his identity, Moraes, born in India, stresses that he is Indian, albeit a very minority person on India:
CHRISTIAN, PORTUGUESE AND JEWS; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns... can this really be India? Bharat-mta, Hindustan-hamara, is this the place? ....No, sahibzadas. Madams-O: no way. Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then; this too is an Indian yarn. (Rushdie, 87)
India, by its material history, is already a palimpsest, which makes Moraes, a child of India, a palimpsest, too, crystallized into one, hybrid person.
Moraes, “called ‘Moor,’ for most of my life” (Rushdie, 5) is also an atemporal palimpsest, a hybrid of the past and present, death and life. His form becomes the model for his mother’s artistic work, which connects Moraes across centuries to Boabdil, the last Moor of Granada: “the Moor found his next incarnation in me;” “she painted me into immortality” (Rushdie, 161, 221). Aurora recasts her son into the last Moor, mingling the present with the past and creating a palimpsest, which is the reflection of India:
Around and about the figure of the Moor in his hybrid fortress she wove her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more accurately interweaving. In a way... they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India.... (Rushdie, 227)
I must note that Aurora’s paintings of the hybrid nation are a reflection of her ultimate palimpsestic creation -- Moraes, her own son.
Moreover, Moraes’ form, Aurora’s model for her hybrid paintings while itself being a hybrid, ages twice as fast. His body ages as if realizing that it is part of an older time, a time long past and is forcing Moraes to catch up with the historical figures long dead in the paintings. Says Moraes, “like a visitor from another dimension, another time-line, I have aged twice as rapidly as the old earth and everything and everyone thereupon.” (Rushdie, 114). Not surprisingly, Moraes’ narration encompasses time well before his birth, into the far reaches of his family and, as we have seen, into the far reaches of India’s history.
Culturally, biologically, artistically, and temporally, Moraes is a hybrid, an existential palimpsest whose very being is the palimpsest. He is both the narrator and the text of hybridity, and this palimpsest of narrator and text only reinforces the complete hybridity that is Moraes Zogoiby.
III. Narrative Mode of Fantasy
In keeping with the importance of the imagination and the inadequacy of scientific discursive modes of explanation, “Pterodactyl” and The Moor’s Last Sigh have surrealistic, or, more accurately, magical realistic, fantasy quality about them which seems to belie reason and linear, past-to-present time. Puran’s third person, limited narrative voice mingles journalistic modes of speaking with imaginative modes of intuition, especially as he encounters the out-of-time pterodactyl: from “‘Pterodactyl -- a flying reptile of the pterosauria class...” (Devi, 154) to “Only love, a tremendous, excruciating, explosive love” (Devi, 196). Moraes’s first person, omnipotent-and-yet-impotent-at-the-same-time, powerful narrator and subjected text, is a hybrid of history, mythology, intertextuality, culture, song, paint, etc. Both narrative modes of fantasy (or should that be fantastic mode of narration? In a world of hybridity, it is both) undermine simple, hegemonic binaries. This dynamic, fluid narration reflect the hybridized nature of the storytellers who narrate these literary palimpsests.
I again turn to my trusty Random House College Dictionary and see that one definition for fantasy is “imagination, esp. when extravagant and unrestrained.” Both Puran and Moraes use their imaginations to tell their stories of hybridity, unrestrained by scientific, hegemonic modes which strive to categorize, bind, and make static the reality which is cultural hybridity. Puran and Moraes literally reject any restraints which binds their imaginations: Puran closes the book he reads about pterodactyls and does not pick it up again (Devi, 155). Moraes moves from one important person in his life to another, which temporarily restrains his movements and ideas (e.g., Uma) until he becomes like the exiled Boabdil, looking back at his homeland and, sighing, only has his imagination to ground him to the world. Thus, the narrative mode of fantasy both storytellers utilize only emphasize the palimpsest that is both the narrator and the story.
IV. End: A Call for Disciples
I wish to return to the metaphor of the palimpsest, that hybrid text produced when past collides with present, when Same and Other mingle. Remember that a new writer erases the old text in order to make room for the new, and even though the old text is there, mingling in a new creation called palimpsest, the new text is sharper, more vocal, and can easily disguise the old text and even the palimpsest itself by its sharper image, etched into the slate. Of course, this dominant, new text is a metaphor for the antithesis of Hybridity, i.e., Unity, or, in the case of Puran and Moraes’ India, Nationalism.
For all of the unrestrained imaginations of Puran and Moraes, the endings for both “Pterodactyl” and The Moor’s Last Sigh are sad: Puran’s transformation does not improve the tribals’ life, and he still leaves on the bus which signifies that Progress which endangers the tribals in the first place (Devi, 196). Moraes becomes an exile of India, setting down his tired form before a tombstone in Benengali; he has lost everything in his double-speed life (Rushdie, 434), and Majority (fundamentalist Hinduism) and Major-Minority (fundamentalist Islam) are rearing their ugly, unitary heads in India, as Moraes warned us (Rushdie, 87). The “tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One” (Rushdie, 408) seems to be the inevitable ending of the story of the cultural palimpsest, that myth of pure identity winning the day. Does that mean these narrators tell their stories in vain?
No, sahibzadas. Madam-O: no way. Remember, the palimpsest needs a reader to look for it, to go beyond the surface binaries and see the fluid hybrid underneath. Most readers are like Puran, an outsider of a tribal’s story, and as such, the stories told by the palimpsest narrator acts upon the reader like the pterodactyl acts upon Puran. In other words, the reader is meant to identify with the palimpsest narrator and, like Puran and Moraes, and becomes a witness of hybridity, which indelibly affects the reader -- the reader himself becomes a palimpsest because he has entered the world that is the hybrid world, and no one leaves unscathed. Whether the reader heeds the call to this “discipleship” to become a palimpsest storyteller himself, will depend on the imagination and love (to quote Spivak) of the reader, for storytelling becomes a witness, an “attentive reading,” to use Spivak’s term, to the large, imaginative reality of Hybridity.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. “The Commitment to Theory.” Questions of Third Cinema. Ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 111-132.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton, 1971.
Devi, Mahasweta. Imaginary Maps. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge, 1995.
Random House College Dictionary. Ed. Laurance Urdang and Stuart Berg Flexner, New York: Random, 1973.
Random House Reading Group Guide: The Moor’s Last Sigh. http://www.randomhouse.com/site/rushdie/rgg.html. 1995.
Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.
© 1995 Rufel F. Ramos