Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond The Nation

KAZUO ISHIGURO SHOWS that the rhetoric of misunderstanding, often a result of cross-cultural or cross-generational encounters, tends to erase social conflict and political history: his characters find it easier to describe a passive state of confusion than to say that they disagreed in the past or that they no longer agree in the present. By allowing the past to irrupt into the present, Ishiguro suggests that treason—the willingness to test and change allegiances—is a principle of critical cosmopolitanism and political transformation. Salman Rushdie, too, is interested in misunderstandings and mistakes, though he tends to approach them synchronically rather than diachronically. Whereas Ishiguro revives the modernist critique of progress and heroism, which I’ve associated with Conrad and Woolf, Rushdie emphasizes the aleatory, the trivial, and the playful, modernist strategies that I’ve associated with Joyce. Like Joyce, Rushdie proposes that ordinary social and semantic mistakes—mix-ups—can create opportunities for effective, if sometimes impermanent agency.

Whiskey Sisodia’s parodic, stuttering slur about “the Engenglish”—that they are confused about their identity because their past is defined by an empire they never understood and no longer possess—became in the 1990s a kind of wry slogan for postcolonial criticism: Homi Bhabha embraced the spirit of Sisodia’s claim for his theory of “DissemiNation” and cultural hybridity;¹ Ian Baucom later reproduced Sisodia’s remark, taken from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), as the opening sentence of his book on Englishness and empire.² Bhabha and Baucom use Sisodia’s comment to pursue a similar line of argument: Sisodia demonstrates in Bhabha’s essay that “the national narrative is a site of ambivalent identification” (167)—over-here is mixed-up with over-there—while he confirms in Baucom’s account that empire is “less a place where England exerts control than the place where England loses command of its own narrative of identity” (3). For Bhabha and Baucom, Rushdie’s parody registers a mix-up of place: English history is defined by events that “happened” somewhere other than England; the conquered territories on which English culture was imposed also served to change what English culture is.

An Indian film producer living in London, S. S. “Whiskey” Sisodia, whose name voices his favorite drink (“Scotch and Sisodia”), likes to announce “The Trouble With The English” in a litany of jibes meant to reverse the usual anti-immigrant litany directed against British Indians and other minorities. In the slogan about English history, Sisodia conveys a witty, generalized indictment, while disrupting the rhetoric of impersonal generalization; eminently quotable, Sisodia’s edgy one-liner offers an implicit parody of racist iteration and habitual abuse. As the slogan is repeated, “England loses command” in the present as well as in the past because the glory of over-here, maintained through the kinds of comments that Sisodia imitates, is diminished by the perspective of “overseas,” which Sisodia interposes by “hissing” at history and by comparing the English to a “dodo,” proverbially foolish and extinct. Sisodia’s critique is in good part a slogan about slogans, a rallying cry about the nature of xenophobic rallying.

It is important to notice that in Sisodia’s comment there are, really, two mix-ups, and they are not equivalent: there is the confusion that Sisodia describes (the effect of colonialism) and also the confusion that Sisodia introduces (the effect of anticolonial critique). “The English” may be mixed-up, but so is Sisodia’s language: he stutters; he combines an attack on colonialism with the rhetoric of colonialist attack; and he introduces an additional layer of commentary by mixing into his intentional statement what seem to be unintentional sounds or partial words. Rushdie is widely associated with the indiscriminate celebration of mixing or hybridity, in part because his novels seem to perform this celebration, in their exuberant combination of genres and cultural references, and in part because his essays call for “mélange” as a practice both of cultures and of writing.³ In this chapter, I will be focusing on Rushdie’s later novels and stories, where he presents examples of mixing that are ambivalent at best—street encounters between immigrants and nativist thugs, the hybridity of U.S. capitalism, the racism of a British consulate—and thus asks his readers to make distinctions among social contexts and social actors that are not all the same. In the passage from The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is suggesting that some kinds of mixing, such as Sisodia’s, are critical and oppositional, whereas other kinds, such as British colonialism, are not. I argue that Rushdie uses the mix-up to introduce new experiences of contemporary immigration and also to distinguish between the cosmopolitanism of exploitative fusion, on the one hand, and the cosmopolitanism of tactical syncretism, on the other.

In his writing about immigration, Rushdie tests different models of cosmopolitanism by manipulating new and old slogans, clichés, aphorisms, epithets, proverbs, and mottos of national culture. Mixing up everyday language, Rushdie’s characters resist generalizations by inserting new perspectives and by reflecting on the language of assimilation. In The Satanic Verses, Sisodia’s remark functions as critique as well as correction because it redescribes “the English” while also changing the conditions of description. Cultural axioms must be resisted, Rushdie proposes, not only because they are fundamental to racist paradigms but also because racist paradigms are fundamental to them. Since axiomatic thought tends to affirm consistent differences, Rushdie argues, it cannot constitute a practical or even ethical model for antiracist literature. Rushdie abjures correctness; only cultural mix-ups, he contends, will make things right.

Rushdie’s contention, that correctness does not constitute an ethical model for antiracist or multicultural literature, echoes Kazuo Ishiguro’s project in the present and recall James Joyce’s in the past. Rushdie’s position does not contribute easily or even principally to a politics of collective action, and some critics have attributed his mix-ups not to analytic purpose but to professional convenience and social accommodation.⁴ Timothy Brennan has described Rushdie as a preeminent example of “convenient” cosmopolitanism.⁵ Rushdie’s work is convenient, Brennan argues, because it does not exhibit sufficient antagonism: according to Brennan, Rushdie fails to project the traditions, behaviors, and tastes appropriate to his origins, offering the West “a flirtation with change” rather than a confrontation with difference.⁶ I argue that Rushdie uses strategies of flirtation and mix-up to offer an alternative to the opposition between accommodation and antagonism. But he is not offering a heroic alternative: national distinctiveness and cultural assertion are the purposeful targets, rather than the accidental or collateral victims, of Rushdie’s fiction.

Rushdie emphasizes the contingent, the popular, and the trivial rather than the traditional, the correct, and the necessary. His rejection of decorum and correctness may seem like a truism of late modernity, but Rushdie suggests that such values persist or have resurfaced not only in new forms of racism and fundamentalism but also in forms of “planetary humanism,” such as multiculturalism and some brands of cosmopolitanism. Flirting, mixing things up, Rushdie imagines new opportunities for agency and intimacy within the imposed conditions of cultural encounter. The psychoanalyst and cultural critic Adam Phillips promotes flirtation as a social affect that makes room for new, not yet imagined relationships.⁷ Phillips argues, “flirting may not be a poor way of doing something better, but a different way of doing something else” (xxii). Rushdie refuses to make absolute political distinctions, not least because he rejects absolutism’s tone: he values commitments that are various, momentary, and even contradictory. Rushdie’s emphasis on less ambitious forms of agency shares in Virginia Woolf’s effort to understand ordinary actions politically and in the efforts of cosmopolitan theorists who have argued for an internationalist ethics of the everyday.⁸

Rushdie’s literary mix-ups are “tactics” of countercultural bricolage.⁹ Michel de Certeau’s immigrant-tactician, “a North African living in Paris or Roubaix (France),” resembles many of Rushdie’s characters (Practice of Everyday Life, 30). The North African, de Certeau explains, mixes up French culture by mixing himself in:

[He] insinuates into the system imposed on him by the construction of a low-income housing development or of the French language the ways of “dwelling” (in a house or in a language) peculiar to his native Kabylia. He superimposes them and, by that combination, creates for himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from his situation.

Like Rushdie, de Certeau recognizes and values the small degrees of resistance that make room for plurality, creativity, and transformation. In some ways, de Certeau is an analogue for Rushdie: they are both itinerant ethnographers, and both emphasize the experience of immigration. Indeed, de Certeau’s theory of everyday life is in many ways modeled on immigrant life, and in this sense his art—“being in between”—is also Rushdie’s. Yet whereas the sociologist’s tactics are ephemeral, Rushdie’s create artifacts. For Rushdie’s characters, creativity is often temporary, but for Rushdie there is production: his “use” of British culture has changed the British novel, making its norms more visible and also more variable.

The Satanic Verses marks a significant shift in Rushdie’s career from narratives of decolonization in India and Pakistan to narratives of immigration in Britain and the United States. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in January 1989, Gerald Marzorati calls The Satanic Verses “the first major novel of the new England, an England with more than two million immigrants, one in which it is no longer clear, exactly, what ‘English life’ comprises, what ‘being English’ means”;¹⁰ Timothy Brennan, in his book-length study of Rushdie’s work, describes The Satanic Verses as “the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain”;¹¹ and Ian Baucom, linking the novel’s tactics to the South London antiracism riots, which the novel describes, argues that The Satanic Verses serves to “re-create England through an act of disorderly conduct” (Out of Place, 200). In his writing, Rushdie is indeed “disorderly,” because he refuses to make sharp distinctions among national cultures and political regimes: he is critical of India and Pakistan but also of Britain; of the after-effects of colonialism but also of the present-effects of immigration; of British racists but also of Islamic fundamentalists. Rushdie’s disorderly conduct has brought controversy as well as acclaim: for arguing that mistakes are a norm not only of British culture but of Islamic culture as well, Rushdie was condemned to death for blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran; the Iranian government continued to support the death sentence, announced in February 1989, until 1998.¹²

Writing about immigration, Rushdie develops the mix-up as an analytic strategy of social confusion and cultural mélange. He elaborates this strategy in his volume of stories East, West (1994) and then turns to reflect on its efficacy in his novel about New York City, Fury (2001). To be sure, the mix-up is also a feature of Rushdie’s early work: in Midnight’s Children (1981), Rushdie’s celebrated novel about India after the British Empire, the narrator is swapped with another infant at birth and then raised by his adopted parents; this private mix-up prefigures the novel’s several mistakes, or modifications, of political history. Midnight’s Children presents cultural mix-ups as accidents of colonialism; in the later work, however, mix-ups become postures of immigrant culture. In the remainder of this chapter, I will identify those protocols of flirtation and incorrectness that Rushdie articulates first in The Satanic Verses and then displays most fully in the urban scenes—sidewalks, public buildings, auctions, and apartment houses—of East, West and Fury.

In their treatment of cultural traditions, including those traditions to which Rushdie does not belong, Rushdie’s mix-ups seek to disrupt “the stultifications of excessive respect.”¹³ Rushdie argues that respect, because it privileges distance and consistency, is not an effective strategy of antiracism or intercultural exchange. Rushdie’s critique of respect leads him to adopt a playful, comic tone, even and especially when he describes the effects of ethnic violence and social antagonism. Rushdie works to oppose these effects by creating unexpected alliances, both among characters and among cultural traditions; he generates new intimacies in the transient encounters and everyday mixing of metropolitan immigration.

Rushdie’s persistent, exuberant humor differentiates his writing from the lighter, more ironic humor of Kazuo Ishiguro and from the more reflective, melancholic novels of W. G. Sebald. But Rushdie shares with Ishiguro and Sebald the effort to write British novels while rewriting what it means to be British. While Rushdie was born in India, his family migrated to England when he was fourteen and then to Pakistan two years later; he was educated in England from the age of thirteen; he has written his novels, full of references to British and U.S. and Indian culture, while living in England or the United States; he is a British citizen who today resides both in New York and in London. Rushdie is part of a “we” who are not English and thus can speak of them, “hiss” at them, and criticize their racist attitudes; however, he is also part of a “we” who take part in English culture, who have occupied places where English history “happened,” and who now occupy England. Since moving to the United States, Rushdie has also become part of a “we” who sometimes live in Britain but do not wish to be confused with all Britons or with the glorified Britannia imagined by Anglophilic Americans.¹⁴ Writing in 1988, the year that Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, Stuart Hall observed two versions of “difference” within “the new ethnicities” of late-twentieth-century Britain: “the ‘difference’ which makes a radical and unbridgeable separation” (the we who are not English) and the “‘difference’ which is positional, conditional, conjunctural” (the we who are heterogeneous and sometimes part of they).¹⁵ The latter “difference,” Hall acknowledged, shares in Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance and thus resists any position that is not conditional and unfixed (“The New Ethnicities,” 162). Like Hall, who advocates a combination of differences, Rushdie seeks to retain the oppositional energy that is generated by separatist difference and yet also to occupy a conditional difference that is less rigid in its distinctions. Rushdie’s writing is not separate from the British tradition, but it is often critical of that tradition. And it does articulate specific experiences of travel and transience.

We can see this double aspiration in Rushdie’s tactics of nicknaming, such as those emplyed in Sisodia’s motto, which create new communities while bringing visibility to the several communities to which any one person belongs. As I have noted in previous chapters, modernist writers often use stutters or stammers to register antagonisms within a civic rhetoric that claims to be uniform and consistent; the stutter represents the discrepancies within collective assertion; it registers a protest that is otherwise prohibited. Sisodia’s stutter, for example, serves to dislodge “the English” from one place and from one historical perspective; the stutter helps to remind readers that Sisodia is in some ways foreign to the language of generalization and in other ways entangled with the culture and language he disdains.¹⁶“The English,” Sisodia’s comment suggests, are less homogenous than they—and he—think they are, and also they are less homogenous than the system of racist aphorism generally proclaims. By speaking of “the English” rather than, say, “the British,” Sisodia is invoking “the particularly closed, exclusive and regressive form of English national identity,” to use Stuart Hall’s formulation, that distinguishes between British citizens, who may be black or white and whose backgrounds may be Indian or Scottish, and Englishmen, who are meant to be white, native to England, and culturally homogenous (“The New Ethnicities,” 161). Writing about the history of race in Britain, Robert Young contends, “‘British’ is the name imposed by the English on the non-English.”¹⁷ This imposition serves, Young argues, at once to mask and to mark the English conquest of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, India, Africa, and the Caribbean (Colonial Desire, 3). Purposefully, Sisodia is using an exclusive name to send up exclusivity: he is suggesting that exclusivity no longer exists in contemporary London and that exclusivity was, in the past, a function of political idiom rather than genuine distinction. Put another way, Sisodia suggests that English exclusivity was a ruse: it masked the heterogeneity of British national and international culture.

As Sisodia’s stutter makes “the English” more diverse, Rushdie’s own stutter, in an interview from 1989, transforms the collective voice—“we”—into a perspective that is at once more intimate and less consistent than it was before. Rushdie’s locution, what seems like an infelicitous repetition, produces an aberrant grammar: “We are increasingly becoming a world of migrants, made up of bits and fragments from here, there. We are here. And we have never really left anywhere we have been.”¹⁸ The content of we changes in this passage, and this change records a diversification not only of national cultures but of rhetoric as well. Because “we are here,” Rushdie proposes, the impersonal, universal we (the community of all persons) of the first sentence becomes the specific we (the community of migrants) of the last. Rushdie’s transformation implies that local collectivity—“we”—has a new temporality: “here” now includes, and will keep including, the “bits and fragments” of places that are spatially but not culturally distant.

In his own voice and in Sisodia’s, Rushdie is resisting authenticity, whose rhetoric of accuracy and distinctiveness was crucial to debates about immigration and antiracism in the 1980s.¹⁹ Immigrant writers were asked to choose between one and several traditions: would they immerse their work in the homogeneous tradition of a particular, oppositional culture or in the intermingled traditions of a mongrelized Britain? As Jeremy Waldron observes in a retrospective essay, the structure of this choice assumed that there were, in the 1980s, homogenous traditions to choose. Like Rushdie, Waldron rewrites the question, shifting his emphasis from a choice among two existing versions of culture (homogeneous and mixed) to a choice among two existing theories of culture (homogenous and mixed): Waldron does not ask, is it more or less authentic to choose a separate tradition; instead, he asks, do distinct, separate traditions exist?²⁰ For his part, Rushdie argues that there is no correct tradition to choose, and indeed he comes to reject correctness altogether. Instead, Rushdie adopts several mixed-up traditions: he calls himself an Indian or Indo-British writer; he calls himself a writer of English literature; he even calls himself a British writer because he is contributing to the diversity of British culture.²¹ At one point, Rushdie asserts that he is “an international writer,” but this does not mean that he has relinquished the other titles or that he claims no national affiliations.²² Rushdie adopts neither an uncommitted cosmopolitanism, belonging to nowhere at all, nor a cosmopolitanism committed to everywhere, on the model of “worldwide allegiance.”²³ Mixing things up, Rushdie generates an attitude of cosmopolitanism that involves eclecticism, flirtation, courtship, nicknaming, and strategic assimilation.

In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie creates the Bombay doctor and art critic Zeeny Vakil, whom the narrator describes as “a rash, bad girl” (52). Zeeny becomes the lover of Rushdie’s protagonist Saladin Chamcha, né Salahuddin Chamchawala, an Anglophile immigrant born in Bombay and transplanted to London; Zeeny aspires to “reclaim” Saladin from England, where he values “warm beer, mince pies, common-sense” (175), and a white, English wife with a “right-wing voice” (182). Impious in her appropriations, Zeeny’s badness exaggerates Rushdie’s own and offers an alternative to Saladin’s assimilation:

She was an art critic whose book on the confining myth of authenticity, that folklorist straightjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?—had created a predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had called it The Only Good Indian. “Meaning, is a dead,” she told Chamcha when she gave him a copy. “Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog? That’s Hindu fundamentalism. Actually, we’re all bad Indians. Some worse than others.

This passage offers a medley of mix-ups: free indirect discourse mixes-up Zeeny’s perspective (“the confining myth of authenticity”) with the narrator’s, or Rushdie’s; Zeeny mixes up racist axioms (“take-the-best-and-leave-the rest”; “the only good Indian”; “wog”) and an antiracist argument; Zeeny’s book title invokes Columbus’s mix-up, in which he misidentified and misnamed indigenous Americans, whom he called “Indians”; Zeeny’s antiracist racist slogan, “the only good Indian,” mixes up time and place by associating several very different conquests (Columbus’s mistake; the genocide of Indians in the U.S.; contemporary Hindu fundamentalism in India); the book title mixes up bigotries, comparing the cowboy racism of the American West (designating good and bad Indians) to the fundamentalism of contemporary India; in a rhetorical mix-up, Zeeny reverses the American quip (“the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) to argue, chiastically, “a dead Indian is the only good Indian.”

The most important aspect of Rushdie’s mix-ups is their visibility. The rhetorical clothes that Zeeny puts on, contemporary as well as historical, look “borrowed,” since eclecticism only looks like eclecticism if the act of combination can be perceived. In an essay whose title is an assertion, “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (1984), Rushdie first voices the theory that he will later attribute to Zeeny. In the essay, Rushdie promotes “eclecticism” as “the ability to take from the world what seems fitting and to leave the rest” (67). Rushdie presents the mix-up as a literary as well as cultural style, something like collage, and he suggests that it is the cultural style of every culture from which he takes. Rushdie objects to the category of Commonwealth literature because it tends to assume, he argues, that writers are defined by their country of origin and must produce literature that is recognizably and exclusively national. Rushdie proposes, instead, that his work reflects many national cultures and, moreover, that national cultures are mixed-up cultures. He describes India as a “mélange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary Coca-Cola American. To say nothing of Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Jewish, British, French, Portuguese, Marxist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Vietnamese, capitalist, and of course Hindu elements” (67). Mixing India with other national traditions that are similarly mixed, Rushdie’s international writing becomes a mélange of a mélange, not a representative democracy of distinguishable parts but a jumble of parts that are themselves already jumbled. Defending The Satanic Verses as a celebration of “our mongrel selves,” Rushdie appropriates racist metaphors by affirming the impurity of metropolitan culture.²⁴

The description of Zeeny’s badness demonstrates one of Rushdie’s most common and effective strategies: a purposeful, often shocking use of racist aphorisms. This strategy is effective not because Rushdie makes the aphorisms less bad but because he draws attention to the function of propriety within racism. By refusing to reproduce that propriety, by refusing to be good, Rushdie opposes racism as a system of moral distinctions. Rushdie’s strategy reflects a substantive choice about how literature can contribute to a vital and flexible democratic culture, and it marks a shift in antiracist, multicultural writing from the affirmation of new, more proper descriptions to the critique of description as a precondition for political and social recognition.²⁵ For this reason, Zeeny does not replace the bad with the good. Instead, she makes the slur worse by multiplying the objects of its aggression: she uses a racist generalization and call to violence (“the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) that originates in the American West to critique generalization and violence in South Asia. The call to violence, which could have been applied by the British to Indians like Zeeny, was in fact applied by American settlers to American Indians, whom Columbus misnamed as—and mistook for—Indians from South Asia. The allusion to Columbus serves to suggest that international conquest, despite claims to rationality and cultural progress, is a tradition of mistakes. By reproducing the slur, Rushdie asserts a strategic continuity between old and new: he argues, in effect, that Western civilization is mixed-up from the start. The difference between Columbus’s mistake and Rushdie’s mix-up is significant, however, because it is the difference between generalization and eclecticism. Columbus assumes that all brown people are the same, that there must be only one “new world,” whereas Rushdie disaggregates general categories, such as “the Indian,” by historicizing the use of names.

In its historical allusions, Zeeny’s title suggests that that the idea of the “good Indian” and the idea that there is “only” one kind of Indian are limited and now outdated strategies of affirmation. Instead of replacing one description with another, Zeeny offers a history of racist description. By neutralizing the rhetoric of good Indians, Zeeny aims to short-circuit present as well as past justifications for violence. Rushdie’s association of colonialist and anticolonialist projects is risky, particularly since it is produced through the repetition of a racist joke. Rushdie retells the racist joke in order to display the social process that makes people into categories. The joke resists its own generalizing statement because it invokes several kinds of Indians (the Indians of 1492; the Indians of the American West; the Indians of contemporary India) and because the one who tells the joke is also an object of the joke, making “only” one into at least two.²⁶ Like her use of the joke, Zeeny’s adoption of the slogan “take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest” serves to diversify objects (“the best”) and reorient agency. Zeeny repeats a familiar mantra of colonialist exploitation as a motto of self-determination, decentralizing the perspective of judgment (what counts as best?) and including “the West” among the elements from which “the rest,” now, can choose. “Taking” in this context has changed, since the initial appropriation assumed unanimity in the evaluation of desirable and useful resources, whereas the second appropriation, Rushdie’s, asserts the contingency of preference.

Zeeny’s question to Saladin Chamcha—“Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog?”—emphasizes in its invocation of a racist epithet (“wog”) that reclaiming a “way of being” means refusing a condition of confinement, as well as a condition of degradation. Zeeny’s question expresses two sentiments: “we’re all ‘wogs’ to the English” and “‘we’ who choose to call ourselves ‘wogs’ are not all the same, as the epithet ‘wog’ was meant to suggest.” Repeating the epithet, Zeeny creates a new usage for “wog” and also recalls the racism of previous usage: she argues that “wog” is the name for any Indian identity based on confinement and also that Indians can only escape this confinement by being a “wog” in as many different ways as possible. For Zeeny, being a bad “wog” is the best way to avoid being a “wog” in the older sense—an object of racist generalization—at all. Writing about the epithet “queer,” Judith Butler makes a similar argument: “a word that wounds,” she proposes, becomes an instrument of resistance if one “destroys the prior territory of [the word’s] operation.”²⁷ That territory, in Zeeny’s case, is the system of authoritative names. Butler recommends “a repetition in language that forces change,” though she acknowledges that the repetition is dangerous: linguistic security, assumed in the original use of the slur, is no longer available once the system of authority is destroyed (Excitable Speech, 163). To create a community in opposition to the slur, Butler argues in a separate essay, one must contest past uses as well as the structure of those uses: this means recognizing that categories of identity tend to generalize and that a new, oppositional use of an epithet will need to promote division rather than conceal it.²⁸ Reproducing the degraded word and asserting its divisiveness, Zeeny opposes bigotry by affirming the diversity of “wogs.”

The title of Rushdie’s novel, “the satanic verses,” aspires to this kind of affirmation: reclaiming the “satanic” for antiracism, Rushdie implies that models of the good have been part of racism’s problem. For this reason, Rushdie opens his novel with two models of the bad, a star of Bombay film who impersonates Hindu gods and a star of British radio who impersonates frozen vegetables; the actors, Indian immigrants, drop from the sky over the southern coast of England. Gibreel Farishta (in English, “Gabriel Angel”) and Saladin Chamcha (approximately, “Muslim Sycophant”) are the only two survivors of a hijacked jet, full of immigrants from India to Britain, which explodes over the “English Sleeve” (5) and casts them down to the sand where William the Conqueror had arrived 900 years before. From the beginning of the novel, England is a culture whose boundaries are permeated by mythic arrivals: “the English Sleeve” recalls, in its translated mixture of English Channel and La Manche (the sleeve), the history of France in England and the foreign conqueror who made England what it is today. Rosa Diamond, an Englishwoman longing for “the dear, dead days,” imagines when she sees Gibreel and Saladin washed up on the beach that they might be the ghosts of Norman invaders (130). Rushdie revisits the myths of English history to show that the old England is defined by the arrival of new Englanders; Rosa Diamond mistakes two Indian immigrants for the historical invaders who would restore England to a past free of Indian immigrants; in Rushdie’s novel, ground zero for an idealized, English past is an event of immigration.

The Satanic Verses introduces its pastiche of cultures (Hindu gods and English vegetables, Indian immigrants and French invaders) in a mix-up of cultural artifacts (songs), each of which expresses disdain for the kind of cultural mixing in which Rushdie has made them participate. The first chapter brings together two of the novel’s many “satanic verses,” whose mutual topic is the inviolability and separateness of cultures. As Gibreel and Saladin float miraculously from sky to ground, Gibreel, postcolonial nationalist, sings an English translation of a popular Hindi song: “O, my shoes are Japanese. These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that” (5). Saladin, Anglophile collaborator, sings back fragments of “Rule, Britannia”: “Mr Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta’s mouth, fought back with voices of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr James Thomson, seventeen-hundred to seventeen-forty-eight” (5–6). Rushdie reproduces in his style of narration the style of schoolboy recitation, dates and all, that Saladin would have learned in his English public school. Thomson’s poem attributes its well-known chorus to angelic verse: “And guardian angels sung this strain: / ‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;/ Britons never will be slaves.’”²⁹ Saladin’s version emphasizes and confirms the “rule” of Britain in his enunciation and exaggeration of English vowels:

Gibreel and Saladin sound the lyrics of authenticity and unchanging national identity in two versions of cosmopolitanism: Gibreel’s traveling nationalism, accessorized but unaffected by other cultures, and Saladin’s old-fashioned assimilation, which relinquishes all to English mastery. Unlike Zeeny who sees “borrowing” as a process of identity in the making, Gibreel invokes his shoes, trousers, and hat merely to dress up a given identity that never changes. Similarly, Saladin, who wants to join the unprofaned Britannia of imperialist song, approves Thomson’s assurance that foreign elements, repelled by Britain’s might, lend strength to British insularity. At the beginning of the novel, Gibreel and Saladin represent two models of transformation: Rushdie attributes the first model to Ovid, in which one may look different but in essence remain the same, and the second model to Lucretius, in which one becomes something completely different, leaving all past characteristics behind (276–77). The Satanic Verses embraces neither model. Rushdie suggests, instead, that Gibreel and Saladin participate in the same superficial multiculturalism: Gibreel buys globally, but thinks only locally; Saladin impersonates, besides frozen peas, a world of voices, including “Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United States,” but he has no voice of his own. Using his many voices and computer-generated effects, Saladin plays an ever-transforming alien, “Maxim Alien,” on British television, allegorizing foreignness as science fiction so that “picture postcard” England can remain natural, familiar, and real (60–63). Playing the greatest of aliens, Saladin becomes a “maxim,” an abstract emblem of “overseas.”

At the end of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie suggests that mixed-up identities need to acknowledge their disparate materials, including the materials of the past. Whereas Gibreel Farishta is unable to live with his many selves and commits suicide in the closing pages, Saladin Chamcha comes to accept his selves more fully, by giving up the “old and sentimental echo” of England and of India (547). Saladin sells his father’s house in Bombay and relinquishes his Anglicized name, which he had adopted while a schoolboy in England. Throughout most of his novel, Rushdie uses nicknames to question the authority of cultural traditions: he renames Muhammad and gives the names of Muhammad’s wives to prostitutes in a brothel. Applying these names, Homi Bhabha has argued, Rushdie “[violates] the system of naming” and thus makes “contingent and indeterminate” the shared perspective of an entire community.³⁰ However, I want to distinguish between renaming and nicknaming: the latter is informal, unofficial, and improper—not a new proper name but an intimate, only partial appellation. For Rushdie, the problem with Saladin’s shortened name is not its incorrectness but its invisibility. To the English, “Saladin Chamcha” conveys no characteristics; it makes the bearer, literally, a sycophant, someone who is happy to fit in. While nicknames register a diversity of selves, Saladin’s contracted name conceals his history and his various affiliations.

Giving up an old, static version of India, Saladin, now “Salahuddin,” embraces a new, changing India by taking part in a demonstration for national integration. Salahuddin swaps the symbolic history of his nation and family house for the quotidian present of personal intimacy and a rented apartment. Zeeny’s final statement in the novel is addressed to Salahuddin: “My place … Let’s get the hell out of here” (547). Assenting, Salahuddin chooses cultural as well as romantic flirtation: his embrace of Zeeny is also his embrace of an “actually existing place” (541)—someone’s apartment rather than someone’s nation—where belonging will be negotiated on a smaller, less axiomatic scale. By challenging shared perspectives, including the meaning of “place,” Rushdie’s work creates a model of cosmopolitan affiliation that is critical of national paradigms but nevertheless specific and collective.

The final lines of The Satanic Verses propose that seduction is not a failing but a tactic of immigrant culture. Rushdie’s novel resolves in flirtation, which it offers as a more practical, more dynamic negotiation of cultural difference than antagonism or respect. In East, West, the collection of short stories that he published in the wake of the Satanic Verses debacle, Rushdie makes this argument from the beginning: he uses flirtation to resist aphoristic truths about immigration, gender, and citizenship and to imagine transient communities based on mistakes, mix-ups, and experimentation. Rushdie’s stories display a new range of social relationships, which are produced in urban settings such as consulates and apartment houses; in these settings, Rushdie explores the manners of immigration as they are embedded and negotiated in the proverbs, jingles, and clichés of popular culture.

The characters in East, West are always being tested: whether they receive a British passport, whether they are welcomed in England, depends on whether they manage the requisite form. Do they speak standard English? Do they affect the requisite gratitude? Does their behavior correspond to their interlocutors’ expectations? Unable to avoid these tests but unwilling to accept them, Rushdie’s characters get their answers wrong, often purposefully. Rushdie suggests in these stories that immigrants can use mix-ups against the aggressive rhetoric of “the immigrant’s mistake.” This rhetoric assumes that the speech and behavior of immigrants are incorrect and in need either of correction or exclusion; it assumes also that culture is unchanging and unchangeable. As a writer and an immigrant, Rushdie is adding to what British literature can contain, by mixing in or mixing up different cultural traditions within a single literary text; moreover, he is criticizing the standards by which correctness is measured.

East, West begins with “Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies,” a story about a potential immigrant from Pakistan to England who does not, in fact, want to immigrate: the story is about the assumption that the West is more desirable than the East and about the assumption by Pakistani men that young women must want to marry and live in England.³¹ While The Satanic Verses focuses on the axiomatic language of doctrine, slogans, mottos, patriotic jingles, and aphoristic slurs, “Good Advice” focuses on proverbs, such as the one in the story’s title. It is important to notice that proverbs constitute a special genre of truism: they may seem to invoke social orthodoxy, but they are suppler and more ambiguous than other kinds of sayings. Rushdie uses proverbs in this story to create opportunities for flirtation and for mixing up clichés.

The main character, Miss Rehana, has come to the British consulate to apply for a visa so that she can join her fiancé in England; her fiancé is a much older Pakistani man to whom she was engaged as a child by her parents. A Pakistani advice expert, who makes his living by defrauding women in search of visas, approaches Miss Rehana to offer his services: he offers what he calls “good advice,” to which Miss Rehana replies, offering the first of several proverbs, “Good advice is rarer than rubies.”³² Within the story, “good advice” is like a proverb: the meaning depends on the interpretation. Miss Rehana knows that there may be several points of view, but the advice expert, Muhammad Ali, does not know this, either about proverbs or about life: he mistakes the regular arrival of women like Miss Rehana—every “last Tuesday of the month” (5)—for the predictability of their knowledge and desires. Making a characteristic into a category, the advice expert assumes that Miss Rehana is one of many helpless “Tuesday women”: he does not imagine for a moment that Miss Rehana might be less than helpless, nor does he imagine that she would not wish to go to England and marry her fiancé. Like the British officers within the consulate, Muhammad Ali assumes that Miss Rehana would lie or falsify papers in order to leave.

There are several initial hints in the story that those who assert their possession of knowledge are rather more mixed up than they realize: while Miss Rehana is described as “munching chili-pakoras contentedly,” Muhammad Ali, who eats nothing and is not in search of a visa, feels the effects of nervousness; her eyes, Rushdie explains, “did bad things to his digestive tract” (6). Muhammad Ali is the conman, but Miss Rehana has all the confidence. Like the British officers, Muhammad Ali is ignorant of his ignorance. Later in the story, the advice expert claims to have produced in Miss Rehana “a captive audience,” even though it is he who is captivated by her (9). These reversals of rhetoric and control intimate the “topsy-turvey” tactics that Miss Rehana will employ at the end of the tale (15).

As in The Satanic Verses, where Rushdie mixes up Islamic fundamentalism and English nationalism, in East, West, he brings together Pakistani sexism and British racism, clichés about marriage and clichés about immigration. “Good Advice” is placed in Rushdie’s collection at the head of a section called “East,” but the title invokes a proverb whose origins derive from both East and West, popular and classical traditions: the Book of Job meets the Pakistani marketplace. Rushdie provides an implicit critique of cultural axioms by showing that family matters at home are embedded in international matters abroad: in the story, sexuality and marriage are international as well as domestic concerns. Rushdie introduces and then mixes up the following assumptions: people in the East really want to be in the West (all Pakistanis want to go to England); the West understands the East (the British consulate officials are smarter than the “Tuesday women”); all women want to get married; all women who come to the consulate are “crooks and liars and cheats” (9); “mistakes” are always accidents.³³

The genre of the axiom structures the expectations of characters and readers alike. In the course of the story, however, Miss Rehana transforms cultural axioms—the East’s desire for the West, for example—into tactics of social manipulation. The advice expert gives Miss Rehana what he calls “good advice”: how to convince the immigration officers that she knows her fiancé well, even though she does not know him at all. Miss Rehana takes this advice and makes it good for her: that is, she uses it to give the most incorrect answers possible. Returning outside after her interview, she reports, “‘I got all their questions wrong. Distinguishing marks I put on the wrong cheeks, bathroom décor I completely redecorated, all absolutely topsy-turvy, you see’” (15). Miss Rehana stays in Pakistan, where she is happy in her job as a governess, by purposefully making the mistakes that all would-be immigrant women, so it is thought, would make by accident. The consulate officials think that Miss Rehana is a liar because she has pretended to know her fiancé better than she does; in fact, Miss Rehana is a liar because she has pretended to pretend. It is the consulate officials, rather than the immigrant petitioner, who are mistaken.

“Good Advice” is a story about the East that seeks to make both Western and Eastern readers reconsider what they think the East wants, who they think the East is, and whether they think the people of the East all want the same thing. By disrupting “shared standpoints” about the good, Miss Rehana also disrupts shared assumptions about marriage, immigration, and gender. She introduces a world of partial alliances and partial deviations: Muhammad Ali and Miss Rehana agree that the consulate officials ask offensive questions, but they do not agree, for example, whether “one’s parents act in one’s best interests” (14).

On the chance that the reader has missed Rushdie’s point, he provides a final clue to the narrative in a moment of anxious correctness. This moment is apparent only in retrospect, from the later knowledge of topsy-turvy intentions. Before entering the consulate, the advice expert offers to examine Miss Rehana’s application to see if her answers will do. She asks him—the narrator reports a note of anxiety in her voice—“Is it OK?” (8). The expert responds, “Tip-top. All in order.” Miss Rehana thanks him for his advice. Reading the story for the first time, one assumes that Miss Rehana wants to be right; reading for the second time, however, it seems more likely that correctness is not her aim. Miss Rehana is anxious, not to pass the test, but to fail it. When she turns her tip-top answers upside-down in the interview, she suggests that correctness—what’s “OK”—is a variable standard, both within national cultures and between one culture and another. Rushdie suggests, finally, it is more important to know which values correctness serves than to know which value is correct.

If Rushdie’s collection begins with the surprise of purposeful mistakes, it ends by promoting mistakes as a principle of transnational culture.³⁴ The last section of the book brings together East and West in three stories about Indian immigrants in England. In each of the stories, Rushdie introduces an image of mixed-up culture: in the first story, it is harmony; in the second, it is federation; in the last, it is courtship. Whereas Rushdie presents the first two images as unfulfilled, unrealistic aspirations (both lead to violence), he presents courtship as a successful, if provisional tactic (a refuge from violence that might help to change the conditions that allow violence to operate). Courtship seems to work because, unlike harmony and federation, it constitutes an informal process rather than a finished object; it demonstrates a commitment to change rather than a commitment to stability. The last story, called “The Courter,” describes several images of courtship: the literal courtship between an Indian ayah and an apartment house porter from Eastern Europe; the figurative courtship in the characters’ speech between English and Hindi and between the standard English of India and the standard English of England; the courtship of Asian and European cultures that makes up the game of chess;³⁵ and the courtship of black culture and white culture that makes up popular music in the 1960s, when the story is set. Rushdie promotes courtship against the isolation of racism and xenophobia; he argues that national rituals and local artifacts are the products of past assimilation.

In its title and in its strategies, “The Courter” invokes Lewis Carroll’s “portmanteau,” a figurative suitcase that creates new words by bringing together, accidentally, two or more unrelated words; the new words are mixed-up objects, in which assimilation is visible and jarring.³⁶ Lewis Carroll is an important figure for Rushdie, who values, as Carroll did, the liberating pleasures of nonsense and private language; both Rushdie and Carroll focus on childhood, a condition in which identities are not yet settled or socialized. Besides the portmanteau, Rushdie invokes Carroll’s “wonderland,” his character “the Dodo,” his obsession with chess, and even Carroll’s real name (Charles Dodgson) to describe the alternative, made-up culture of an immigrant apartment house in London. Like Carroll, Rushdie makes linguistic tactics out of linguistic mistakes, new words out of mispronunciations.³⁷ Rushdie’s linguistic playfulness detaches persons and things from confining interpretations. Derek Attridge has argued about portmanteau words that they help to show “that meaning is an effect of language, not a presence within or behind language, and that the effect is unstable and uncontrollable.”³⁸ For Attridge, the portmanteau word is a norm of language because “every word in every text is a portmanteau, a combination of sounds that echo through the entire language and through every other language, and back through the history of speech” (“Unpacking the Portmanteau,” 154). Attridge is arguing that all language is a mix-up, that combinations go unnoticed only because they are unrecognized. Rushdie has a more specific concern: he aims to represent the social and political conditions that make mix-ups hard to see; to do this, he makes mix-ups on purpose.

In “The Courter,” immigration creates portmanteaux, mixing by mistake or without intention one culture into another. The portmanteau facilitates not the combination of two meanings into one but a playful encounter, a flirtation. Rushdie uses the semantic mix-up as a principal device within a story about courtship and immigration, but the mix-up of words also generates the story from the beginning. “The Courter” is about naming, renaming, and nicknaming, and it is also about name-calling. Set in an immigrant apartment house on the west side of London, the story tells how the narrator, like Rushdie an immigrant from Bombay, became a British citizen in the 1960s. The title of the story is the name given to the apartment-house porter by the narrator’s Indian ayah. The ayah’s mispronunciation of English—her Ps come out as Cs—transforms the porter into a “courter,” a kind of courtier, by mistake. The porter, who is also an immigrant from the East, but from Eastern Europe, decides to embrace the new name: “‘Courter, courter, caught.’ Okay. People called him many things, he did not mind. But this name, this courter, he would try to be” (177). Mixing up porter and courtier, a doorman or bag carrier and a royal attendant or wooer, Rushdie brings together ordinary culture and literary tradition, labor and aristocracy, West Kensington apartment house and European chivalry. Rushdie makes up a new word; the new word, however, implies that carrying and flirting, travel and courtship are—have always been—related endeavors, that there is no contact without exchange.

By assimilating the porter to her own style of speech, the ayah establishes new intimacies between East and East (Europe and India) and between East and West (India and London). Through tactics of assimilation and poaching, the ayah and the porter, initially mixed up by the strangeness of London, develop agency and comfort by doing the mixing themselves: the porter renames the front stairs to make the ayah’s climb less difficult—he calls them the “Kensington Ghats,” after the Ghats (mountains) of India (175); the ayah and the porter go out on dates to department stores, where they pretend to choose furniture and curtains for “imaginary homes”; they create domestic routines within the “cramped lounge” of the porter’s tiny apartment (188); they fancy themselves and their employers as characters in “The Flintstones,” taking the name “Rubble” and giving the name “Flintstone” to the narrator’s parents; they make chess their “private language” (194), transforming “the great formalisation of war [into] an art of love” (196). Nicknaming functions as a practice of assimilation because it allows characters to personalize and to appropriate. Besides the porter and the ayah, the children in the apartment house also make up names: the narrator and his siblings give nicknames to all of the apartment house residents (179–81); they call the porter “Mr. Mixed-Up,” because they cannot pronounce his Eastern European name and because he seems confused by his surroundings (179); they call their ayah “Jumble-Aya,” because she, too, seems mixed-up (181);³⁹ they call a retired colonial administrator “the Dodo,” after the extinct bird and the foolish character in Lewis Carroll’s fiction (191). Many of the characters in Rushdie’s story have more than one nickname, and the point of the story is not to choose among them. The proliferation of nicknames within the apartment house serves to resist the social limitations imposed by racist and xenophobic name-calling, which is directed at the immigrant characters by outsiders, such as English thugs and politicians. Whereas the racists in the story demand correctness, even while making mistakes, the immigrants create a community by mixing up cultures at will.

The violence of correctness is an important and literal element in Rushdie’s narrative, and it becomes increasingly intense and explicit as the story develops. This violence ranges from the porter’s intimation that he has been called by names he does not like but has accepted (177); to a slap in the face, when the narrator’s father, shopping for baby supplies, asks a salesgirl if she has any “nipples” (the word refers only to the tops of baby bottles in Indian English) (183); to a rant about “immigrants” by an English politician on television (189); to a racist diatribe, shouted by local thugs who mistake the narrator’s mother and ayah for two other Indian women (204); and, finally, to a stabbing, in which the porter is attacked when he rushes over to protect the ayah from the thugs (206). The private language of the story is disrupted, permanently and violently, by the attack at the end. The characters’ intimate and playful names are replaced by a single nasty epithet, which not only precedes the knifing but also, to the thugs, seems to justify it. One of the thugs, who is convinced that the mother and ayah are the relatives of an Indian resident whom they have come to assault, react to the women’s claims of “mistaken identity” with further generalization: “‘Fucking wogs,’” he said. ‘You fucking come over here, you don’t fucking know how to behave. Why don’t you fucking fuck off to fucking Wogistan? Fuck your fucking wog arses. Now then,’ he added in a quiet voice, holding up the knife, ‘unbutton your blouses’” (204). Even though the thug believes that there is, in this case, no “mistaken identity,” his rhetoric suggests that, in effect, there can be no “mistake,” because he believes that all Indian immigrants are the same (“wogs”), that all of them behave in the same way, and that none of them behave correctly. The evaluation of correctness belongs to the racist with the knife. The racists hate the immigrants for making social blunders, whose offensiveness, they say, justifies physical harm; however, they later describe their own blunder as an “honest mistake” (205). The honesty of the thugs’ mistake depends on the assumption that all Indians are, in fact, indistinguishable. Like Columbus’s mistake in The Satanic Verses and like the mistake of the consulate officials in “Good Advice,” the so-called honest mistake is an effect of racism: it is a result of generalization rather than intimacy, and it serves to reinforce exclusion and correctness. In contrast, the immigrants’ mistakes, once they become Rushdie’s mix-ups, create new communities and new intimacies.

Rushdie delays the comparison between nicknaming and racist name-calling until late in his story. At the beginning, the porter chooses the role he will play, adopting a local idiom against the confining idioms of xenophobia; made-up names, such as the porter’s, turn the apartment house into a home. However, when the nicknames are gone, effaced by violence, the story’s figurative mix-ups dissolve into literal confusion: the flirtation between the ayah and the porter ends; the ayah returns to Bombay; the narrator’s family leaves England for Pakistan. Some time after these departures, the narrator returns to the apartment house, where he finds a new porter in residence. At the door of the porter’s lounge, “a stranger answered” (211). The narrator asks, “Where’s Mixed-Up?” The man, a “stranger” to the narrator and to the story’s idiom, responds: “I don’t know anything about any mix-up.” In Rushdie’s narrative, rhetorical flirtation is extinguished by physical antagonism, even if the idioms of that antagonism—xenophobic name-calling—are resisted by the story’s transformation of standard Britishness. Rushdie’s proliferation of nicknames, in the apartment house and in his writing, helps to create new examples of British culture and also to change the rules of inclusion. He deploys the mistakes of immigration as the mix-ups of critical cosmopolitanism.

More than fifteen years after he published The Satanic Verses and a decade after East, West, there are signs that Salman Rushdie has entered the late afternoon, perhaps the early evening, of his career. For one thing, he has taken to writing about the Upper West Side, that zone of Manhattan comfort and liberal respectability. For another, he has begun to parody not only his life but his literary devices as well. In Fury, the novel about New York that he published in 2001, Rushdie imagines an unimaginative copywriter—a novelist of the one-liner—who has designed a culturally eclectic but terribly boring slogan for American Express. The copywriter shows this slogan to his neighbor, an immigrant (like Rushdie) who has moved from Bombay to London to a “comfortable Upper West Side sublet” in New York City (Fury, 29).

Above several images of cities photographed at sunset, the copywriter has printed the following motto: “The sun never sets on American Express International Banking Corporation.” The motto is a cosmopolitan mix-up: the copywriter brings together semantic elements from different national traditions (an aphorism of the British Empire and an advertisement for an American company), and the elements are themselves international (artifacts of colonialism and globalization). However, the motto is also mixed up in another sense, and this is the parody: the advertisement implies a limited future for the company that it means to advance. The slogan claims that American Express has as many outposts and as much longevity as the British Empire had in the past, and it also proposes that U.S. imperialism has one-upped the British product, which no longer sees the light of day. These assertions are not quite compatible: the copywriter, who knows little about history and even less about politics, seems to fancy the British Empire as a heroic role model for corporate America; he does not realize that images of conquest are unlikely to generate, in fact have never generated, universal or permanent appeal.

The copywriter has a problem with generalization: not only does he assume that national aphorisms command unequivocal interpretations, but he assumes also that English-sounding immigrants, like his neighbor, must be wholly and proudly British. The copywriter figures that the neighbor, who sounds British to him, can—or would—speak for British patriotism. Whereas Rushdie has written in the past about the problems of cultural exclusiveness—Britain’s refusal to acknowledge its mix-up with India, for example—he now acknowledges that inclusiveness is not always desirable. The mix-up depends on the mixer, and on the political and economic contexts of multinationalism.⁴⁰“‘Is it okay?’” the copywriter asks the so-called Britisher: “‘There’s no offense intended. That’s what I want to be sure of. That the line [in the advertisement] doesn’t come across as an insult to your country’s glorious past’” (36).

Rushdie’s adman is concerned about the ethics of cultural borrowing. He is wondering whether “it’s okay,” as he puts it, to insert what he takes to be a lofty British aphorism into a low, or popular, American slogan. He is concerned about showing cultural respect. What is interesting about this scene, as a comment about anxious internationalism, is Rushdie’s sense that borrowing is not, or is no longer, the relevant subject for ethical dispute: it does not really matter either to the British-sounding neighbor or to Rushdie that the copywriter is mixing traditions. What does matter is the copywriter’s generalization, both about global expansion and about immigrants. The worst insult, Rushdie is arguing, is the copywriter’s assumption that all immigrants with an English accent would wish to defend Britain’s glories; or that all immigrants with an English accent would think that there are any glories to defend.

Rushdie asks his readers to notice, as the copywriter does not, that the problem with the slogan is not its mix-up of national cultures, or of epic diction and commercial jargon, but rather its failure to acknowledge both the history and the critique of global conquest. Rushdie implies, finally, that the copywriter’s mistake is more accurate than his intention: American capitalism, exemplified by the slogan, shares in the generalizations of Britain’s triumphalist past. The copywriter’s unintended offensiveness, for all its naïveté, reflects a systematic blindness that is comparable to the “honest mistake” of the thugs in East, West. Writing against aphoristic truths, Rushdie demonstrates the interpretive conflicts that corporate slogans and national axioms do not otherwise promote. Through his parody of mix-ups, Rushdie argues that the mixing of national traditions is now (and has long been) a tradition of global capitalism; he reminds us, that is, that a critical cosmopolitanism will need to reflect on the uncommon histories of international contact. To produce models of culture that are less consistent and also less invisible, Rushdie generates aesthetic and cultural mistakes: inadvertent double meanings; the mispronunciation of words; lightness of tone where seriousness seems to be required. These mix-ups are critical to the extent that they diffuse prior gestures of correctness. For Rushdie, that persistent question—“Is it okay?”—is never the right one.