ABSTRACT
In “Imaginary Homelands”, Rushdie insists on the necessity o f moving away from essentialist conceptions o f race, culture and nation in this era o f mass migration. Similarly, he rejects an exclusive allegiance to native traditions to construct his own “family tree” (Imaginary Homelands, 2021). Defining himself as a “literary migrant”, Rushdie is happy to list the various members o f his “literary family” (which includes Gogol, Cer vantes, Kafka, Melville, and Machado de Assis), thereby creating a ten sion between the constraining laws o f genealogy and the free affiliative nature o f writing. Dickens is cited in an interview with Victoria Glendinning, along with Sterne, Swift, Grass, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O ’Brien and Marquez.1 In a recent interview with Heather Neill, Rushdie again acknowledges Dickens’s “huge influence” on his writing, “especially his
1 Victoria Glendinning, “A Novelist in the Country of the Mind,” The Sunday Times (25 October 1981): 38. On the mixed traditions of his novels, see “ ‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (1983), “Gunter Grass” (1984), and “In Good Faith” (1990) in Imaginary Homelands. To these incom plete lists of novelistic influences must of course be added the many sources from high and popular culture that Rushdie delights in hybridizing, from Ovid to The Wizard of O z , from the Qur’an to the Bombay talkies. The much noted Grass-Rushdie connection is extensively documented by Patricia Merivale, who discusses similarities in narrative technique, structure, tone and themes, among which “ambiguous paternity [which] forms a large part of [their] search
juxtaposition o f a surreal foreground with a minutely naturalistic back ground.”2 I want to suggest that Dickens’s fatherly — or indeed father ing — presence is felt at crucial moments in his novels.
