Migrant form: The politics of simulation in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray

This dissertation traces a genealogy for postcolonial representation from Joyce's modernism. I examine figural transgressions in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; in Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses; and in two films by Satyajit Ray. Drawing upon descriptions of the simulacrum by Gilles Deleuze, I argue that these texts perform a formal politics that produces interpretive problems, rendering them eccentric and mobile. Migration becomes a decisive metaphor for their unsettling, and insistently unsettled, aesthetic. In Section One, I demonstrate that the eccentric figuration in Ulysses and the nonsensical excess of Finneggans Wake contest the claims made for the sovereignty of unified form by John Ruskin. Using my discussion of these novels to offer a formal model for postcolonialism, I complicate Homi Bhabha's notion of "in-betweenness." Section Two explores Rushdie's adaptation of Joyce's precedent, opening with an examination of the inside and the outside in Midnight's Children, followed by a study of the grotesque in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie organizes montage and digression as radical means of historical critique, often extending, and deviating from, the representational protocols of these techniques. From the overtly partial, "non-realist" forms in the texts of Joyce and Rushdie I proceed to a discussion of simulation in Ray's realism. In films like Charulata (The Lonely Wife ) and Agantuk (The Stranger), Ray suggests ornament and Wanderlust as subversive antidotes to the oppressions of domesticity and the nation. I close with the argument that picturing the nation is the act of picturing migration.