nature also has its own evolution, and human ends and interests are both social and individual products. Each era starts with imagination and superstition, then moves towards reason and logic, and descends again into imagination. Rushdie’s magic realism is an intersection of these paradigms to the point that it becomes a space haunted by ghostly doubles. Aurora, the Moor’s artist mother is „her dead mother’s phantom, doing her deeds, speaking in her departed voice.” Belle’s „night-walking daughter was keeping the mother alive, giving up her own body for the departed to inhabit, clinging to death, refusing it, insisting on the constancy, beyond the grave, of love – that she had become her mother’s new dawn, flesh for her spirit, two belles in one.” Since Belle used to be keen on elephant tokens, Aurora „would name her own home Elephanta; so matters elephantine, as well as spectral, continued to play a part in our saga, after all.”1 The Moor’s saga moves backwards and forwards in time, weaving the threads of several family stories of „comings-together, tearingsapart, rises, falls, tiltoings up and down.”2 Spectrality is a mark of the postcolonial condition, which is by analogy a palimpsest where various layers of writing / history compete and where erasures eventually surface. The body of history thus seems to lose solidity and slip into the unsolidity of fiction. In his essay „Is Nothing Sacred?”, Rushdie declares that his „most beloved books have been fictions” and as a result of his loss of a sense of God he „was drawn towards the great creative possibilities offered by surrealism, modernism and their successors, those philosophies and aesthetics born of the realization that, as Karl Marx said, `all that is solid melts into air.`”3 The Moor’s own body epitomizes India’s history. Like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, the Moor is misshapen. Apart from being oversized because, like India, he grows too fast, he was born prematurely, and he has a deformed right hand. When still a child, he has the body of a man but the soul of a boy; at 36, he is already grey, and that is, as he says, „a family characteristic” as his „mother Aurora was snow-white at twenty.”4 As if mirroring the wealth of condiments on the subcontinent (playfully called a „sub-condiment”), the Moor’s bloodline is a hybrid. His father, Abraham Zogoiby is a south-Indian Jew, possibly a descendant of Boabdil. His mother, Aurora Zogoiby, né da Gama, was born into a Christian spice-trading family claimimg illegitimate descent from Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator who brought European trade and colonialism to India. Such conflicting lines of ancestry may be too much for Moraes’ body. The Moor feels his body a prison. In his youth, he dreams of peeling off his skin and „going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan.” After dedicating a whole passage to this dream of escaping the body jail, floating „free of flesh, skin and bones”, the Moor moves to the next passage, which relates the peeling off of his skin to the peeling off of history, which is another jail, „the prison of the past.”5 Throughout the novel, when the Moor’s body bleeds, the body of history bleeds. Later on in the story, this dream of becoming „simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world”,6 which sounds like a triumph of the mind and soul over the body, turns into a negative vision in which the peeling skin takes with it all the elements of the Moor’s personality until he becomes „nobody, nothing”, a 1 Rushdie, The Moor, 10. 2 Rushdie, The Moor, 12. 3 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism 1981 – 1991, (Penguin Books, 1992), 415, 417. 4 Rushdie, The Moor, 12. 5 Rushdie, The Moor, 136. 6 Rushdie, The Moor, 136. Sfera Politicii nr. 10 (164) / 2011
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