THE PARADOXES OF THE GAME: A BIRD'S EYE VIEW UPON THE NOVELS OF SALMAN RUSHDIE AND V.S. NAIPAUL
THE PARADOXES OF THE GAME: A BIRD'S EYE VIEW UPON THE NOVELS OF SALMAN RUSHDIE AND V.S. NAIPAUL

Summary/Abstract: In the present article, I intend to discuss the modality in which the Self and the Other interfere and inter-react in the novels of two Postcolonial writers of English language, in what I have called a game-like relationship, i.e. a relationship whose purpose is not necessarily to win whatever game is played, but rather to perform an action which, like almost all man’s actions, has the structure of a game, as Huizinga puts it in Homo Ludens . The result of such a game is the encounter with the Other. This game between identities and alterities is seen as performance to reach to and manage the Other or the Self, first at the cultural level, then as projection at the narrative level. These intrinsic relations that appear at the level of narration and culture, as well as of language, and consequently at the level of perception of the world envisaged and created, take place and develop in what HomiBahbha called ‘the third space’ . This is the space of hybridity, where differences do not turn into islands of identity , but meet other differences. The space where identities and alterities are born and function is where ‘The Other must be seen as the necessary negation of a primordial negation of a primordial identity – cultural or psychic – that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the cultural to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality.’ The comparative perspective upon the novels of the two writers will thus be constructed against this background, the result being ‘the paradoxes of the game’.

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