Methods of representation in the novel

In “The Moor’s Last Sigh”, the author gives great importance to various visual and verbal mediums of language, such as films, painting and fiction, as instruments of subverting reality or rewriting history. In films, the narrative of the sensually feminine Mother India is uncomfortably displaced by a patriarchal narrative, that too which surrounds a failed “Indodaddy” figure who himself is a foreign formulation or “lurid mirror-image”, so that there is a breakdown or perversity in the very idea and attempts of representation.

Paintings though are another matter entirely in the novel. Aurora’s artwork, through its ability to “steal their souls by literally drawing them out of their bodies” (130), is representative of her subjective attempts to reconcile her own individual history with a national and cosmic order. However, the stark emotionality in her paintings hints at the chaos within the artist’s own soul. Seeking a Mother India in the walls of her bedroom as a reaction to her own personal grief and loss, for example, is symptomatic of a wider “sense of inadequacy of the world, of its failure to live up to her expectations” (131). But Aurora’s artwork’s all-encompassing mythological streak finds full fruit in her Moor paintings, within which she even “in her fretful last days, had concealed a prophecy of her death” (218). It is significant that the subject of these paintings is her son. This allows for a free-flowing relationship to develop between the artist and the subject (219) (albeit a relationship which flirts with the boundaries of what is appropriate, as expressed when Moreas learns “the secrets of her hearts as well as her mind” on page 221 and when Aurora depicts herself and her son in the subversive Moor and Tussy and To Die Upon a Kiss paintings). More importantly, it allows Aurora to redefine her son as a “supernatural Entity… painted [him] into immortality… [in an effort to] transcend and redeem [the world’s] imperfections through art” (220-221). Her reimagining of her son as Boabdil further brings the quasi-mythological narrative of the novel full circle in “an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation” (227) to palimpsest the ugly present reality.

Moraes’s yearning for authenticity expresses itself clearly in his dream of peeling off his skin and going into the world naked “like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopedia Britannica…set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan.” According to Coetzee, “the notion of “authenticity” has been one of the first casualties of postmodernism in its deconstructive turn. When Moraes, in prison, wonders whether he is on the wrong page of his own book, he moves into a dimension in which not only he but the walls of his cell consist of no more than words. On this purely textual plane he can no longer be taken seriously when he laments that he is trapped within ‘colour, caste, sect’ and longs for an authentic life outside them. If as self-narrator he wants to escape the inessential determinants of his life, he need only storytell his way out of them.”

So perhaps the biggest effort at anchoring perceptions of the self and the nationhood is through memory, and hence the written word of the novel itself. Indeed, the exilic protagonist and narrator of the story starts his narration from the end, but in a broader sense attempts to reclaims his sense of continuity and stability in his personal history as well as in his national history. Perhaps it is fitting then that his encounter with Miranda culminates in an attempt to reclaim his mother Aurora’s Moor paintings, centering and echoing the theme of reclamation for the exilic figure within his national narratives in the novel.

Citation: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/mar/21/palimpsest-regained/