Shame by Salman Rushdie from a postmodern frame

Abstract

Postmodern fiction, which appeared in a post-World War II period, bears distinctive qualities from other literary movements such as realism and modernism structurally, stylistically and thematically. It can be perceived as a challenge against or attack on fixed language systems, subject matters, narrative style, plot development in the face of modernist and realist quest for meaning in a fragmentary world. One of the principal works of postmodern literature published in 1983, Shame by Salman Rushdie exhibits the best features of a post-modern novel by a style of magic realism by touching some political issues and some significant characters in a turbulent Pakistan in the way of historiographic fiction. Although language seems to reflect real historical events, an imaginative and subjective narrative style betrays its break with reality. Shame deserves being called as ‘a postmodern novel’ in the light of the key characteristics of postmodern fiction such as narrative fragmentation and reflexivity, the decentring of the subject, fictional framing of devices and the plurality of worlds, the displacement of the real by simulacra, magic realism and historiographic metafiction. Therefore, in the novel Shame where the loss of reality and meaning is celebrated rather than lamented, I will try to demonstrate how it is worth the title of “a postmodern novel” by resorting to its comparisons and contrasts with such movements as realism and modernism.