Elizabeth Bishop’s laughter often appears to be at someone else’s expense. But it generally gives way to self-critique (as in ‘Maneulzinho’) and to a rethinking of the observer’s position (as in ‘Filling Station’). Bishop’s poems combine empathy with judgment: her speakers’ failures of sympathy are to be both rejected and felt as our own. This simultaneous heightening of sympathy and critique is possible because Bishop rejects Henri Bergson’s model of humor, in which the self/other dichotomy is the basis for laughter. Instead, Bishop suggests that subjective experience can be continuous between observer and observed, and that laughter marks the infrequent moments when we recognize that continuity. This chapter argues that, for Bishop, humour arises from the tension between sympathy and distance, marking both the moment of revelation and the inevitability of that moment’s passing.
Like his protean characters, Rushdie has changed dramatically over the course of his career. His shifting discussion of Islam’s internal diversity is exemplified by the brief possibility of a pluralist Islam in The Satanic Verses, by the idyllic past of anti-communitarian Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown, and by the catastrophic results when outsiders conflate these Islams with those of the fundamentalist Imam in The Satanic Verses or the Iron Mullah in Shalimar the Clown. But the shift from the novels to the memoir seems greater than the shifts within the novels, as Rushdie appears to reject the novels’ attempts at sympathy with his opponents. His treatment of Islam in Joseph Anton simplifies his own investigations of how religion, race, and cultural identity interpenetrate for moderate Muslims and atheists of Muslim descent, and the role of racism and xenophobia in solidifying “Islam” as an object of fear. This article tracks how Rushdie’s treatment of Islam as variously practised by individuals, Islam the global religion, and extremist terrorism are increasingly collapsed in The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, and Joseph Anton. The memoir suggests deep changes in Rushdie’s attitude.
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