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Literature as a function of Aristotelian Catharsis: A Study in relation to
Shame by Salman Rushdie
K. Anandawansa
Department of Languages, Faculty of Social Sciences and Languages, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka
krish.anandawansa@gmail.com
Abstract: The Greek term “Catharsis” has two principle meanings: purgation and purification. More
specifically, the crux between the two meanings holds the notion of catharsis as a medical purgation
of excessive emotions on the one hand, and the ceremonial purification of the body on the other. In
more liberal terms, purgation of emotions deals with the physical or non-moral, while the moralistic
element of purification of the soul comes in the other. Aristotle‟s notion of catharsis was extensively
applied to poetry and tragedy, and explored the effects of how spectators‟ emotions such as pity and
fear are cleansed through characters on stage. The argument of this paper is that the body of
Literature, as a whole, is a matrix in which both the writers and the readers or spectators, relentlessly
purge their emotions and purify their souls. In other words, the very act of generating a poem, writing
a novel or a piece of drama is a metaphor used by the authors, wherein writers dress characters to vent
their views, emotions, likes and dislikes. Alternatively, this production purifies their souls. For the
reader or the spectator, Literature is more close to the original sense of the word catharsis mentioned
on the onset. The aim of this paper is to explore the notion of catharsis providing examples from a
selected work of literature, namely Salman Rushdie‟s Shame.
Keywords: Ambivalence, Catharsis, Nation, Sexuality, Violence.
I. INTRODUCTION
The concept of Aristotelian Catharsis in Western philosophy represents a process of purgation in
which the emotions of pity and fear are aroused by tragic circumstances of a play. According to
Aristotle, a tragedy (in the sense of a theatrical play) should have amongst other things, “incidents
arousing pity and fear; wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions” [2]. Reflecting on the
eons accepted notion, a critical observer would desire for answers to the questions: Why is it required
to have incidents that arouse pity and fear in a tragedy? Is it only through tragic drama that such
emotions can be felt?
In response to the first, Catharsis calls upon the interests of the audience, making it realize the notion
as a form of moral purification through which a sense of discipline is placed on the audience‟s reaction
to pity and fear, or demands of it a sense of intellectual clarity in the aftermath of pity and fear. For
the author of a tragedy, incidents that arouse pity and fear could be considered as deliberate artistic
placements in the plot that allows the audience to experience these emotions, thereby compelling the
tragic character to change, develop and move towards a higher realm of moral purification. Therefore,
emotions aroused through Catharsis have several guided intentions, and are not mere haphazard
activities.
However, Catharsis seems to demand more philosophical sense of the audience. It is expected to
intellectually bind to the emotions in rational thought, without mere passivity and blindness, and
come out of the theatrical experience purged; emotionally and intellectually. Extending the notion of
Proceedings of Jaffna International Research Conference (JUICE-2012), pp. 141-147, published: March 2014, Sri Lanka
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Catharsis beyond the conforms of tragedy, it is possible to suggest that Literature itself on the whole,
functions within the scheme of Aristotelian Catharsis, and thus all forms of Literature, including
poetry and all varieties of prose, just like tragic theatrical performances to which Aristotelian
Catharsis was initially applied, have purgatory effects from both author and spectator / reader
perspectives.
It is in this light that this paper attempts to explore the notion of Aristotelian Catharsis in relation to
Shame by Salman Rushdie, both in terms of author and spectator (herein reader) perspectives. The
attempt is to analyze the portrayal of characters, major themes and narrative style in an effort to posit
Rushdie‟s work as a Cathartic effort of Literature, which has said and specific motives for those who
live in post-colonial, modern times, amidst ongoing wars and post-war situations.
The paper focuses on a qualitative analysis of Rushdie‟s Shame in relation to Aristotelian Catharsis,
and utilizes content analysis of the novel and relevant secondary reading material as research
methodology to validate its stances.
II. THE ANALYSIS: What is Shame?
Shame is possibly Rushdie‟s critique on a variety of matters of post-colonial importance: nationalism,
the disjunctive ambivalence of the Westernized elite against the post-colonial Eastern “playboy”,
homelessness, cosmopolitanism, diaspora consciousness, troubled boundaries of gender, caste and
class and also of violence (both physical and sexual), all which make the novel an emotional outcry.
The primary characters of General Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa on the one hand and Omar
Khayyam Shakil, along with the three mothers and Sufiya Zinobia, his wife, create the almost perfect
platform upon which Rushdie evokes the reader‟s emotions; a juxtaposition of both semi-historical
allegory and magical realism. Amidst this setting, Shame highlights pity and fear evoked through the
narrative and construction of Shame, and explores connotative implications on its readership.
It is possible to state that human subjectivity is an articulation of the self in relation to his/her
environment. What is crucial and at the heart of an analysis of Shame is the sense of belongingness, or
rather the lack of it. Rushdie‟s very narrator in Shame hints at an incomplete selfhood when he
remarks that “Although I have known Pakistan for a long time, I have never lived there for longer than
six months at a stretch…I have learned Pakistan in slices, the same way as I have learned my growing
sister…I think what I‟m confessing is that, however I choose to write about over-there, I am forced to
reflect that world in fragments of broken mirrors…I must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the
missing bits” [6].
2.1. The post colonial subject
In line with the statement above, Rushdie‟s stance as post colonial subject and as migrant is therefore
condemned to fragmentation and the emotions that are aroused therein the eyes of the reader create
pity for the narrator‟s lack of belongingness and subsequent existential anxiety. Yet, as the narrator
tells us, this very fragmentation leads on to an almost unbearable sense of lightness of being: “I , too,
know something of this immigrant business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a
newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will).
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And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our
conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the
thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown” [6]. Rushdie further reiterates that
the best thing about migrant people is “their hopefulness” and the worst is “the emptiness of one‟s
luggage” [6]. Such de-rootedness or lack of fixation of the self is effective and apolitical, and captures
well one‟s position as a subject in post-modern society. The apositioning or “lack of gravity” (in
Rushdie‟s own words) facilitates the creation of an unconventional questioning subject; one who is
capable of perceiving the surrounding flaws and is the hope for change in future through what he/she
sees. The author‟s voice in Shame thus instils a series of questions on the existence of the post-modern
self which is revealed cathartically to the reader.
As Rushdie, who has “lost his gravity” or sense of belonging and writes as an immigrant from England
about the fragments he perceives of India and Pakistan, so does the “dispossessed” protagonist of the
novel, Omar Khayyam Shakil, perceive the world. Belonging to three uneducated, conventional
mothers, who obsessively share the shame of his illegitimate birth, Omar‟s precise parents are never
heard of within the span of the novel. His questionable parentage is a central way in which Rushdie
calls the reader‟s attention to the illusion of identity. Similarly, Iskander Harappa and Naveed Hyder
are also revealed to be of illegitimate parentage. Such destabilization of the stable identity
problematizes the notion of the self, and romanticizes it as a basis of authority. Rushdie‟s catharsis
upon the reader then emphasizes that persons are extremely unreliable, inconsistent and
contradictory; a reality in the post modern era.
2.2. Omar: The post colonial parallel?
Omar, the chief protagonist, is thus born and sees the world upside down: “Our hero, Omar Khayyam,
first drew breath in that improbable mansion which was too large for its rooms to be counted; opened
his eyes; and saw, upside down through an open window, the macabre peaks of the Impossible
Mountains on the horizon. One – but which? – of his three mothers had picked him up by the ankles,
had pummeled the first breath into his lungs…until, still staring at the inverted summits, the baby
began to scream” [6].
Omar thus grew in a precisely inverted conventional order, and this misaligned situation right from
the very birth in which Rushdie plots Omar instills in the mind of the reader a sense of emotional
pity and fear for Omar‟s future. The Cathartic effect lingers on with the reader from the moment
Omar is born, through his enclosed upbringing in Nishapur, his venture into the real world through
the dumb-waiter, and his life ever after, for he does not know what shame is, a fundamental precept
behind his very existence. This sense of lingering curiosity instilled in the reader, mingled with
emotions of pity and fear for Omar, is definitely Rushdie‟s artistic deliberations. By evoking such
emotions for Omar, Rushdie questions notions of belongingness, descent, shame and shamelessness,
conventionally valued notions for human existence.
2.3. The dialectics of shame
Rushdie‟s fictional creation of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, daughter of General Raza Hyder and Bilquis is
based on an exemplification of the diverging axis between shame and shamelessness. The central
plot line of Shame finds Sufiya metamorphosing like Gregor Samsa in Kafka‟s The Metamorphosis,
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into a beast, who then hypnotizes and seduces young men and rips off their heads with super
human strength. Though magical, Rushdie‟s presentation of Sufiya‟s metamorphosis within Shame
creates fear and anticipation in the reader, and while highlighting the extent to which
transmutation in an individual can occur, it makes the reader question the view of the self as a stable
self-contained entity. The instilled interrogation debates the boundaries of the self versus
the other, a fundamental human duality, often blurred and unresolved.
Linked with Sufiya‟s “beastliness” is her uncontrollable blushing “whenever her presence was
noticed by others” [6]. Rushdie reiterates that Sufiya also “blushed for the world” [6], the
implication being that Sufiya is an epitome of her land‟s, emphatically Pakistan‟s, shame.
Blushing according to Rushdie, is a slow burning. He explains it as a psychosomatic event- a
sudden shut down of the arterio-venous anastomoses of the face which floods the capillaries with
blood that produces the characteristically heightened colour. For those who do not believe in a
psychosomatic explanation, Rushdie urges to reflect upon it as a heightened sensibility that can be
brought on even by the recollection of an embarrassment of which they have been the subject [6].
The question is why does Rushdie personify Sufiya as an emblem of shame, and what are its
implications?
Prior to finding an answer, one must identify Rushdie‟s work in the light of magical realism. The
term magical realism was primarily utilized to refer to George Louis Bogais‟ whose work adopted
Argentinian folk literature [5]. Later on, this notion was used to refer to works of literature by
authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Issac Bashevis Singer,
Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass and Isabel Allende. Magical realism in the works of these authors
refers to the social, political, cultural and humanistic movements concentrated around human
spirituality. Moreover, the term is more inclined to define the social mindset just as much as
Surrealism is inclined towards defining the personal mindset.
A careful examination of Sufiya‟s magical realistic characterization and its intents in Shame
problematizes several social aspects. Having lost his only male heir to the family in his wife‟s womb,
General Hyder, Sufiya‟s father, a conventional man who believes the eldest in the family should be a
son, rages at the reincarnation of the son in a female body with the birth of Sufiya. Sufiya thus is a
“shame” in her father‟s eyes- a born failure. Her birth also instigates a rift between Hyder and his
wife, Bilquis, which only aggravates with time, never to be mended. Therefore, the height of
emotions generated by Sufiya‟s transmutation into a beast which devours men, coupled with the
over-realistic act of blushing impregnated by Rushdie on his character creates a strong voice on
behalf of women in the Q (Pakistan), the personal and social pressures to which the marginal has to
go through.
For Omar, the act of having sex with his wife, generally believed to be an act of production or
construction rather than of destruction, is subverted, and instantly the rational reader
contemplates and feels pity for the subordinate man (Omar) and fears the power of female
sexuality. The ultimatum is that the story creates what Samir Dayal refers to as “sexual
competition” where there is “fear of the phallic woman‟s threat to marriage” [3]. The novel itself is
also a semi-historical allegory of the birth of Pakistan, its controversial conflicts and General Hyder,
the man with “razor guts” who is actually a representation of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, the
man who outruns the Bhutto regime in a violent manner.
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2.4. The release through Catharsis: Shame and its perceptions
What then does Rushdie pre-suppose through this catharsis? Does the schizophrenic, situational
ambivalence he arouses in the reader‟s mind through Sufiya suggest a pessimistic, misogynist view
on marriage? Rather, the subversive element of the catharsis should be understood, wherein
Rushdie would want his readers to identify the oppression of women, and the violence that it
would instigate within, becoming a “threat” which displaces the male-centric view on the
institution of marriage. The use of a woman‟s image to generate the message is powerful than
using a direct male protagonist, and Rushdie being an unorthodox, alternative writer, could not
project anything better than Sufiya to move the conventional reader. In addition to questioning
notions of sex and destruction, by creating the schizophrenic, beastly-like and blushing Sufiya,
Rushdie also arouses the readers‟ strong emotions to question and blush for what has happened in
his semi-imaginary country within the discourse of the assertion of a new nation. Sufiya could well
be blushing for the incorrigible past of the allegorical Pakistan, with its problematic expressions of
masculinity, and the implied trappings of power and therefore violence; a fundamental existential
reality that has to be questioned by today‟s citizen.
Within this same nationalistic discourse, we find a masculinist projection of the women in the
novel: Rani Harappa, Bilquis, "Good News," Arjumand the "Virgin Ironpants," and of course Sufiya
Zinobia. This is counter balanced with an emasculation of the chief male characters, who appear
to be caricatures or underdeveloped characters- Just as Raza Hyder's career and military background
suggest a parallel with Zia ul Haq, Iskander Harappa or Isky in the novel likewise appears to stand
in for former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed in 1978, while Omar Khayyam
Shakil has parallels to a poet who was “never popular in his native Persia; …he exists in the West in
a translation that is really a complete reworking of his verses, in many cases very different from the
spirit of the original” [6]. This de-stabilization of the normative figure apprehends the reader in
such a cathartic magnitude that the result is none other but to question what Louis Althusser
would call the “always-already interpellated subject”.
We also have Rushdie‟s own autobiographical comment projected through the narrator‟s voice:
“I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is
always lost in translation; I cling to the notion- and use, in evidence, the success of Fitzgerald-
Khayyam- that something can also be gained” [6]. Such non-traditional, de-stabilized
characterization creates an apolitical premise upon which Rushdie can criticize politics, societal
norms and values. It creates a sense of insecurity in the minds of the reader, who is troubled with
pity and fear and thus seeks answers to problematic expressions of masculinist nationalism,
violence and oppression onto women. What does Rushdie want to create through such a de-
stabilization of norms via a “translated man”?
Samir Dayal explains that Rushdie here “seems to be asking the unaskable: that men, especially
subcontinental men, should reconsider their notions of masculinity and the implied trappings of
power and therefore violence. In so doing they might negotiate the boundaries and liminalities
between the Orientalist stereotypes of the effeminate Asiatic and the (in some ways more
conceptually slippery) stereotypes of Asiatic machismo” [3]. The reader of the novel would then be
purged through the realization that the male-Orientalist mindset is not free from the throngs of
power in abuse and violence. It is this deconstructive cathartic consciousness that dawns upon the
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reader and Rushdie‟s experiment of emasculation of men and masculinization of women could be
termed successful. It also serves the intention of creating a deconstructive force on the workings of
the phallocentric nation.
Rushdie as the narrator in Shame is not naïve; he is an intrusive narrator, who questions the
authority of both narrative and history. When Raza Hyder (Zia ul Haq) plots the overthrow of
Iskander Harappa (former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) Rushdie intrusively comments
“Well, well, I mustn‟t forget I‟m only telling a fairy-story. My dictator will be toppled by goblinish,
faery means. „Makes it pretty easy for you,‟ is the obvious criticism; and I agree, I agree. But add,
even if it does sound a little peevish: „You try and get rid of a dictator some time.‟ [6]. Rushdie‟s
voice not only becomes an apology to evade serious criticism and banning of his work by alluring
his readership into believing his narrative to be mere fiction, but also creates anxiety in the reader‟s
mind about the very construction of history. By tying fictionality closely with the actual history of
Pakistan, Rushdie de-stabilizes, dis-empowers and thus blurs the entire notion of history, for
Pakistan‟s history itself was artificially inseminated after India‟s independence. Therefore, in
Shame Rushdie presents at one and the same time, an account of history in its semi-fictional reality,
juxtaposed with pure fictional characters. The overwhelming of emotions generated in the reader
at this point of displacement creates a diabolic uncertainty, which compels the reader to move out of
conventionality and question one‟s own roots and identity.
Amidst such interpretations of Rushdie as a narrator and an analysis of Shame, it is equally
important to inquire into the notion of cosmopolitanism in relation to Rushdie and in Shame. As
exemplified before, Rushdie seems to position his narrative stance “beyond” borders. His semi-
fictional land in the novel, the Q., and semi-allegorical references to Pakistan‟s political history
gives him ample space to criticize his “imaginary homeland”. Timothy Brennan insists that
“Rushdie is a cosmopolitan writer, but in Shame (as in The Moor's Last Sigh, Midnight's Children,
and The Satanic Verses), Rushdie's ambition is even more to re-imagine and trouble received
notions of belonging in nationness or to particular zones - Pakistan or India; London or Bombay -
not so much from a cosmopolitan unanchored perspective as much as from within the interstitial
spaces of those zones themselves” [3]. Yet, the emotional instability created in the mind of the
reader, and thus the cosmopolitan sensibility does not disable and make fragile his characters in
Shame. Rather, Rushdie purges our emotions, not only making us criticize conventionality, but also
making us feel ambivalent even about the notion of cosmopolitanism. The catharsis creates a
situational ambivalence, which is both a problem as well as a strength for the purged reader.
Moreover, Rushdie makes us feel that the ambivalent state is actually necessary to understand a
person‟s cultural location in terms of ethnicity, class, gender and nation.
2.5. The functional purpose of Catharsis
Catharsis dawns the human mind into realization. This realization is arrived at by reasoning and by
knowledge, and knowledge is valuable. Not only does it enable us to depend on our beliefs, but it also
enables us to believe in the beliefs of others. However, knowledge can be misapplied if the end is a
bad. There must be what Kant calls „knowledge of ends‟, and what Aristotle calls „virtue‟. As Roger
Scruton further explains the proposition, “A person may not know what to do or what to feel, and it is
in learning what to do and what to feel that we acquire moral competence”[7]. Morality for Aristotle
is a matter of character and moral education [7]. He argued that the virtuous person knows what to
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feel, according to the demands of the situation- the right emotion, towards the right object and in the
right degree. Moral education has such knowledge as its goal. Scruton suggests that this is what
should be taught when teaching Humanities. Literature, then has an unsurpassable educative and
moralistic motive, and this is precisely what authors such as Rushdie demand through their work
from their readership.
It is obligatory to align this discussion and the impact of such a purgation of emotions and re-thinking
as a necessity for us today, where we have to develop capacity, cognition and analytical skills in
deciphering our complex situational existence in a post-war context. Capacity development in this
sense requires us to be aroused with what we read, see and experience and the development of pity
and fear for those involved, as characters, should make us realize the subversive elements that work in
relation to identity, belongingness, sexuality, nation, violence and situational ambivalence. For
Rushdie, his expression in the form of Shame is itself cathartic, for through the novel he himself purges
his emotions, while purifying readers‟ souls by opening up their intellect. Though its author is a
diasporic Indian, Shame expresses the intuition needed for us as Sri Lankans, living in a nation which
has experienced two civil uprisings and one ethnic war in the past thirty years, which questions the
very fundamentals of human existence and co-habitation. In this sense, Shame is truly a timely
necessity in modern times.
III. CONCLUSION
Literary criticism, based on the reading of Literature, is a site of struggle; the numerous ways in which
the reader interprets it, alternatively re-interprets society and its manifestations. Hence, it is a
political exercise. The most important point as Tony Bennett writes “is not what literature‟s political
effects are but what they might be made to be…by the operations of Marxist criticism” [1]. This
“symptomatic reading” [4] if to use Althusser‟s terminology, is constructive and is the basis for
knowledge generation and the making of ideology. Shame in this sense, as a work of Literature,
produces a political field of cultural practice in its catharsis as this paper highlights, and shows the
dialectic of existence of both the exploiter and the exploited, and the intricate ways in which power
and dominance is practiced and balanced in society. What is required out of this purgative
experience is to “listen” to Rushdie‟s personal emotions as the narrator, while being objective enough
to understand the workings of the individual in the social matrix for a better reading of the post
modern subject.
REFERENCES
[1]. Bennett, T. “Formalism and Marxism”. Routledge, p. 111, 2003.
[2]. Chaudhury, P.J. “Catharsis in the Light of I ndian Aesthetics”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol.24, No. 1,
pp. 151-153, 1965.
[3]. Dayal, S. “The Liminalities of Nation and Gender: Salman Rushdie's "Shame". Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
Association, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 39-62, 1998.
[4]. Ferretter, L. “Louis Althusser”. Routledge. pp. 73-74, 2006.
[5]. Kumara, K.K., “ ” Vidarshana Publications, p. 45, 1999.
[6]. Rushdie, S. “Shame”. Vintage Books, pp. 69, 85-87, 1995.
[7]. Scruton, R. “Modern Philosophy-An Introduction and Survey”. Sinclair-Stevenson, pp. 271, 326, 1994.
