34. Chitra VR

34. Chitra VR

Voices of dissent:
Narratives of Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie

Abstract

The narratives of both Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie draw on cultural narratives to capture the ethos of their age thwarted by the hegemonic institutions and power structures in their societies. Their narratives achieve their ends not with a soul-searching call to action but by quietly generating respect for the imagination that can never be content with things as they are.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983) take as theme the impact of political processes and shifting images on ordinary people as well as the critical importance of literary imagination for political inquiry itself. The paper aims at a comparative critical understanding of the generic configurations of the political novel as revealed in the works of these two major practitioners of political fiction in Latin America and India, contemporaries in two different countries. The study also attempts to identify the basic orientation in the ideological make up of both the writers, essential principles underlying their treatment of genre and also examines the various techniques and styles espoused by them thereby entailing a familiarity with their cultural specificities and mutually enriching cross-fertilization of ideas.