SALMAN RUSHDIE’S NARRATIVE STYLE

Salman Rushdie's writing re-imagines complex

historical, socio-cultural and political worlds of
postcolonial South Asia. He is best known for his
magical realist style of writing (Magic realism
is a genre within literature, film or in visual arts
where magic elements are intermingled with
realistic details in a natural matter-of-fact manner.
The term was first applied by the German art critic
Franz Roh to describe a style of painting in 1925.
"Mystery of human living amongst the reality of
life". The Oxford English Dictionary defines magic
realism as, "Any artistic or especially literary style
in which realistic techniques such as naturalistic
detail, narrative, etc., are similarly combined with
surreal or dreamlike elements) and his irreverent
treatment of historical, religious and political
themes in his novels.
Rushdie's fictional representation of social and
political events of South Asian history employs a
number of literary devices such as unreliable
narration (unreliable narrator: is a narrator in
fiction or film who cannot be trusted; is prejudiced,
ignorant or biased; due to a confessed illness, or
bragging and exaggeration, or who makes
transparently false or delusional claims, or one
whose perception is immature or limited.),
analepsis (also called flashback is an interjected
scene that takes the narrative back in time from
the current point to an earlier point in a story or a
movie.), digression (a passage or section that
deviates from the central theme in speech or
writing), irony, hyperbole, repetition, allegory
(a story, poem, or picture which can be interpreted
to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or
political one), grotesque satire (comically or
repulsively ugly or distorted.), collage (An
assemblage of diverse elements especially in
visual art where the artwork combines fragments
of photographs, newspapers, other artworks and
texts to create a new whole. It may refer to any a
work of art produced by this technique of
assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or
fragments in unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition.)
and intertextuality (A term coined by Bulgarian-
French philosopher Julia Kristeva in the 1960s
which means that texts influence the reader's
consciousness and any text is read through the
meanings and understanding created by previously
read texts. In literature it has come to be
understood as the layers of meaning created by
authors alluding to and borrowing of each other’s'
words and concepts. It also refers to the
interdependent ways in which texts stand in
relation to one another to produce meaning.). His
writing has been described as postmodern
because it questions realist modes of knowledge
and representation deconstructs binaries of
east/west, religious/secular, colonizer/colonized as
violent and hierarchical; and destabilizes
authoritarian metanarratives. Rushdie sceptically
examines, satirises and parodies the ways in which
historical events such as India's independence, the
Partition, communal violence, the emergency,
religion and secularism are constructed in
discourse and are popularly understood.