Rushdie and the Art of Modernism

This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah Khomeini but also by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. It is significant that the novel’s subject is modernism itself, represented by Aurora Zogoiby, whose work synthesizes virtually every avant-garde movement, from fauvism, surrealism, and Dadaism to cubism, expressionism, and abstractionism. In offering a history of twentieth-century art, Rushdie explores how modernism can retain its aesthetic autonomy while giving voice to its social and political commitments. The chapter concludes by examining two aspects of the novel that are usually considered postmodern: the figure of the palimpsest and Moraes’s accelerated aging. The former is associated with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s mythic method, while the latter—with its sense of accelerated temporality—functions as a metaphor for modernism itself.