''The Terrible Power of Metaphor''. The Performativity of Language in Salman Rushdie

Introduction i Introduction According to Austin, performative speech acts in literature can only be “infelicitous”, since the subject (“I”), in this case the author, is not talking seriously. To have a happy performative, in fact, in which what I state is what I do, “I must not be joking, for example, or writing a poem” (9). Works of fiction, as novels, are fictional as the word itself suggests. Yet they do: they in fact create a new world, verisimilar or not: fictional characters, names, history, places, relations... Moreover, their are worlds that necessitate of at least two people to be real: the author and the reader, both of them bound by language and its rules. Yet if language does create a parallel reality based upon an interactional act, can we really assume the rules of language do not belong to the fictional reality as well? This thesis is based upon the assumption that the realm of literature and that of reality, literature and literalism, are not so different: reality can in fact be taken as a performance and literature can have literary effects. In this perspective, the work of Hillis Miller has been fundamental. Salman Rushdie’s works was chosen as the subject of this thesis because they question the authorship which is based on words. In so doing they unveil the fact that words do not only show, but also hide. They do not always create, but also destruct. They do not have just one, but multiple meanings. “The terrible power of metaphor”, the title of this thesis, is a quotation from The Satanic Verses and it can be interpreted in different ways. In this first meaning, it underlines the fact that metaphors, normally not included among the performative element since they transpose the meaning from one object to the other, do have power. They reveal what Bhabha calls the “third space” but also the “foreignness” present in the language: the meanings of words change from sender to receiver. As far as the adjective “terrible” concerns, this is particularly true for the effects Salman Rushdie’s characters undergo, which are exposed to both the creative and destructive power of language. But it also refers to the fact that the effects of words are almost never predictable. According to Aravamudan, he himself quoting Derrida: