Criticism Of Shame :: essays research papers

Criticism of Shame          Shame, published in 1983, a year before his most famous work The Satanic Verses, presents a fabulistic account in a country that disturbingly represents Pakistan. Critically, Shame is compared to Midnight&8217s Children because the of its resemblances in themes and style. The idea for Shame, reported interviewer Ronal Hayman in Books and Bookmen, grew out of Rushdie&8217s interest in the Pakistani concept of sharam, a word that denotes a hybrid of embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, humoursty, and a sense of having an ordained place in the cosmea. Reaction to Shame was mostly irrefutable many applauded the style of Rushdie&8217s work and the themes it presented .     Many critics appreciated the subject matter and presentation of Rushdie&8217s work. Cathleen Medwick in Vogue stated, "His parvenue overbold. . . reveals the writer in sure control of his extravagant, mischievo us, graceful, polemical imagination. (414, Editor) "Magic realism", a technique often employed by Rushdie is essential to the structure of how the tommyrot of the book is conveyed. Michael Gorra&8217s characterization of Rushdie&8217s style stated, "His prose prances, a declaration of freedom, an self-reliance that Shame can be whatever he wants it to be coy and teasing an ironic and brutal all at once. . .Rushdie&8217s work is responsive to the world rather than removed from it, and it is because of this responsiveness that the mode in which he work represents the continued life of the novel. . . and one wants something better to describe it that the term &8216magical realism&8217&8212 is an assertion of individual freedom in a world where freedom is strangle. . . "(360, Editor) Christopher Lehmann-Haupt boldly asserts, "If Mr. Rushdie had followed the logic of realistic psychology in Shame, he would have robbed his novel of its spectral magi c, its sectionalization of narrative logic that allows time to rush suddenly forward and reveal the end of things, or permits characters to be reincarnated in each other. He would have robbed his novel of the truth&8212not precisely the truth of the parable or allegory or myth, but the truth of a narrative that describes a world apart and is a system accurate and logical only unto itself"(356, Editor) Lehmann-Haupt then goes on to compare Shame to Midnight&8217s Children ". . .this doesn&8217t write down to account for the extravagantly tragicomic nightmare evoked by Shame, which does for Pakistan what Mr. Rushdie&8217s equally remarkable first novel, Midnight&8217s Children did for Inida.