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’s 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’s interest in the Pakistani concept of sharam, a word that denotes a hybrid of embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, and a sense of having an ordained place in the world. Reaction to Shame was mostly positive; many applauded the style of Rushdie’s work and the themes it presented . Many critics appreciated the subject matter and presentation of Rushdie’s work. Cathleen Medwick in Vogue stated, "His new novel. . . reveals the writer in sure control of his extravagant, mischievous, graceful, polemical imagination. (414, Editor) "Magic realism", a technique often employed by Rushdie is essential to the structure of how the story of the book is conveyed. Michael Gorra’s characterization of Rushdie’s style stated, "His prose prances, a declaration of freedom, an assertion that Shame can be whatever he wants it to be coy and teasing an ironic and brutal all at once. . .[Rushdie’s 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 ‘magical realism’— 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 magic, its breakdown 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—not 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’s Children: ". . .this doesn’t begin to account for the extravagantly tragicomic nightmare evoked by Shame, which does for Pakistan what Mr. Rushdie’s equally remarkable first novel, Midnight’s Children did for Inida.