1Roy and Rushdie have often been compared and if Roy has sometimes been presented as one of Rushdie’s midnight’s children,1 she has also been depicted by her detractors as a pale, even ghostly, copy of the former.2 The points of comparison are numerous. Indeed, apart from the similar use, in Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things of the motif of the twins, of the grotesque nose or of the pickles, which are rather anecdotal, the two writers are similarly engaged in the questioning of the notion of history and postcolonialism and are committed in reshaping the English language thanks to constant and bold innovations. This analysis will focus on Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses in comparison with The God of Small Things, because the ghost issue, deeply rooted in these novels, turns out to be a way of apprehending the similarities but also the differences as it partakes from a different dynamic. Ghosts, real and fake ones, linger over the pages of these three novels.3 Along with ghost-like characters and haunted houses, the writing itself obeys a ghost logic. However, even though there are a number of similarities in the ghost’s representation in the two novelists’ works, the meaning and function of ghosts turn out to be different. Roy’s phantoms tend indeed to be connected with a trauma and with haunting as an obsessive process whereas Rushdie’s ghosts, in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses are associated with migration and hybridization.

2Roy’s and Rushdie’s main characters are systematically turned into ghosts and thus similarly affected by a ‘ghosting’ process, or ‘devenir-fantôme’, to use one of Deleuze’s images. They indeed share with ghosts their invisibility, their in-between position and their permanent wandering. Saleem, in Midnight’s Children,4 is bewitched into invisibility on the way back from Pakistan to India: ‘in the basket, I learned what it was like, will be like, to be dead. I had acquired the characteristics of ghosts! Present, but insubstantial; actual, but without being or weight’ (MC 381).5 Saladin in The Satanic Verses6 wonders ‘maybe I’m a ghost already’ (61). He actually echoes Saleem’s definition of ghosts—‘present but insubstantial’— because his job forces him into disembodiment: being a professional dubber, ‘ [he] remained invisible, shedding bodies to put on voices’ (61). What is more, he loses his human appearance and acquires the malleability of ghosts when he is turned into a devilish goat and compared to melting wax figures. Gibreel, in SV, flirts with the world of ghosts as he regularly communicates with them and becomes a restless soul wandering in London and in the dream world of Jahilia. Besides, from MC to SV Rushdie’s characters are significantly haunted by the same question: ‘What is a ghost?’7

3In The God of Small Things,8 the untouchable character, central in the novel, is of course the very image of a ghost, invisible in society and described as ‘the man with no footprint’ (163, 216, 218, 265, 289, 290). But Estha too takes on spectral attitudes in 1992: ‘he had acquired the ability to blend into the background... to appear almost invisible to the unstrained eye’ (10), ‘over the years Estha withdrew from the world’ (12). The twins, Rahel and Estha, are actually presented as living dead who seem to have died on the day of the drowning of their cousin and of the murder of their untouchable friend before their eyes. They have been trapped in the frozen time of trauma since that day. They have become rangers of the in-between, ‘short creatures with long shadows patrolling the blurry End’ (3), drifting between past and present, reality and fantasy. This represents another characteristic they share with ghosts along with Rushdie’s characters: their liminal position and their wandering condition. Being outcasts living ‘in the penumbral shadows between two worlds’ (GST 44), and watching from the margins, Roy’s twins thereby re-activate the etymological link between spectre and spectacle. They are indeed presented as spectators in their own life, offstage actors, who stay ‘forlornly at the edge of the driveway, on the periphery of the Play’ (GST 184).

4The same feature applies to Rushdie’s characters who are either voyeurs (Omar in Shame and Saleem in MC), or linked to the cinema. Saladin and Gibreel are literally affected by the spectrality of the image, and the latter is also turned into a spectre: ‘His images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers went blank and their publishers blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the screen... that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to... bleach’ (SV 16).

5According to Barthes the very fact of being photographed is equivalent to a ‘devenir-spectre’: ‘Imaginairement la photographie... représente ce moment très subtil où, à vrai dire, je ne suis ni un sujet ni un objet, mais un sujet qui se sent devenir objet: je vis alors une micro-expérience de la mort: je deviens vraiment spectre.’9

6Besides, the ghost-like quality of Rushdie’s and Roy’s characters is emphasized by the fact that they are systematically hidden away in liminal and unreal spaces close to limbo such as the History House and the periphery of reality (in which the twins are trapped) in GST, or the magicians’ ghettos of MC, the dark pension of SV reminiscent of Benjamin’s description of Parisian passageways, London’s underground ‘that subterranean world in which the laws of space and time had ceased to operate’ (SV 201) or the fantasmatic Jahilia of Gibreel.

7Ghosts stand at the precise intersection of past and present, poised between appearing and vanishing, described as being ‘both there and not there’ in MC or as: ‘not death, just the end of living’ in GST. As liminal beings, they could echo Homi Bhabha’s description of postcoloniality. Indeed, he interprets the prefix ‘post’ not so much as meaning ‘after’ or ‘counter’ but rather as a ‘beyond’, ‘a liminal space of encounter’. He writes that in postcolonial works ‘the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing’ (my emphasis) and uses Heidegger’s image of the bridge which ‘escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro [...] the bridge gathers as a passage that crosses’.10 Ghosts, dwellers of the beyond and provoking the encounter of two worlds by their presence, thus appear as an emblematic figure of postcoloniality.11 Rushdie’s definition of the contemporary (and we can add postcolonial) individual is also in keeping with the ghost’s condition and the postcolonial porosity of frontiers: ‘this new permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times.... This is the dance of history in our age: slow slow, quick quick, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines’.12 Roy alludes as well to the idea of wandering and transit as a postcolonial syndrome but already with a negative overtone since it conveys the idea of entrapment and limbo: ‘We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore’ (GST 53, my emphasis).13

8Those two metaphors (dancing and imposed wandering) point at the major difference between the two conceptions of the ghost. If ghosts are at a turning point, half way between vanishing and appearing, the two novelists seem to choose two opposite dynamics, at least as far as the characters are concerned: Roy seems to drag her characters back into limbo whereas Rushdie brings them back to life, in a forward movement.

9‘An absence rather than a presence’ (291 GST)

10In GST, the notion of ghost turns out to be associated with haunting, and initiates a regression or backward dynamic applying to the characters as well as, to a certain extent, to the narrative and the syntax. From the first scene onwards the sense of a looming tragedy prevails. The twins are haunted by a trauma: ‘It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes’. This drama ‘cuts into’ their identity, it drains life out of them: ‘it had returned to empty them’ (225), ‘the emptiness of one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other’ (20) as shown by the metaphors: ‘Emptiness and Quietness’ (328). Estha could remind the reader of Giacometti’s sculptures of the ‘walking man’, not only because he keeps walking,14 but also because he becomes inaccessible, like Giacometti’s fleshless men who always seem to be on the verge of vanishing and remain far away even when one draws close. He actually seems to be subjected to the same whittling process as the sculptures. ‘Dwindling’, a regression into a void, thus appears as one of the manifestations of ghostliness in GST.

11The process of erosion also affects language. Sentences are left unfinished: ‘There was a sweaty grappling for an edge to hold on to. And a One Two and.’ (GST 202) or ‘once upon a time, there lived a’ (192). The process is even inscribed in the text when the narrator says about Velutha: ‘Sentences disaggregated into phrases. Words’ (287). Other sentences are broken up by full stops: ‘it was warm. The water. Greygreen. Like rippled silk. With fish in it’ (123) and by devices such as hyperbaton and anacoluthe. Words are torn apart as for instance ‘ei.der.down’ (102) or as:

‘A Wake
A like
A Lert’ (238)

12which stresses the part of blanks (as a sort of visual silence) on the page, or as the word ‘nictitating’, repeated until exhaustion by the twins and literally crumbling into nothingness:

Nictitating
ictitating
itating
tating
ating
ting
ing. (GST 189)

13In the same way, the narrative bears the marks of haunting both as a compulsive return and as a regressive process. Structured by returns of the past (the narrative keeps going back to 1969—when the tragedy happened—and forth to 1992), but also by returns of the same scenes and of the same leitmotivs, the text obeys a haunting logic and seems to be as helpless as the twins: ‘unable to... exorcise the memories that haunted them’ (191). Estha’s departure at the train station for instance appears twice, on page 300 then again on page 325, or the revelation of Ammu and Velutha’s affair returns three times (pages 78, 202, 254-257). The metaphor of the moth is a leitmotiv that haunts Roy’s characters as well as her narrative (see pages 112, 136, 293, 315, 316): ‘Its [Pappachi’s moth] pernicious ghost-grey...—haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children’s children’ (49). The metaphor also appears as a distant echo of Rushdie’s ‘moth of despair’ and ‘moth of unease’ (MC 423, 413).

14Leitmotivs, lingering over the narrative and acting as an insisting and disquieting presence, are akin to ‘textual ghosts’. Indeed some of them are mysterious fragments extracted from the trauma scene and act as spectral resurgences or residues of the drama, disclosing the secret in a flash without the reader being aware or being able to make sense of them. The reader has to wait until page 310 to understand that ‘Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze’ (6, 12, 32 et 55, 310) is a reference to the smell of Velutha’s blood after he’s been beaten to death. Leitmotivs act as floating signifiers awaiting a signified which is also what a ghost is: a lingering empty shell waiting to be understood in order to be avenged. Like ghosts they represent translucent elements standing out of an invisible underlying network since they both reveal the secret and remain ineffective and meaningless as long as they’re not replaced in the chronology. The process is alluded to in the novel when the narrator accounts for the narrative’s purpose: ‘Those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.’ (32)

15The novel is haunted on a phonic level as well with the proliferation of alliterations. Those in ‘s’ in particular, running throughout the novel as in: ‘the yellow teeth were magnets. They saw, they smiled, they sang, they smelled, they moved. They mesmerized’ (102),15 initiate a constant rustling and whispering (one of the preferred manifestations of ghosts), paving the way for an aesthetics of secrecy.

16In addition, the stasis inherent to the ghost affecting the characters and the narrative is inscribed within the syntax. The striking use of noun phrases, that is to say verb-less and therefore tense-less structures, stylistically contributes to this feeling of timelessness.16 The forward movement of reading is also forced into regression by the proliferation of palindromes such as: ‘They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both Madam I’m Adam and Malayalam backwards as well as forward’ (6) or ‘NAIDNI YUB, NAIDNI EB, ’ (GST58).17 The double movement of the syntax (and the narrative) going forward and backward mimes that of the ghost trapped between appearing and disappearing, past and present, life and death. In the same way Roy chooses figures of speech which rely on stasis and reversal: the omnipresence of the oxymoron: ‘an unmixable mix’ (44) ‘the noisy television silence’ (29), of chiasmus: ‘Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered’ (19), ‘And he waited. And waiting he wiped. And wiping he waited’ (101),18 the recurrence of the prefix ‘un’: ‘flowers blooming and unblooming’ (188), ‘crumpled people uncrumpled’ (140), ‘wobbled.... unwobbled’ (139), ‘Ammu’s tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real’ (8)—all these choices operate a reversal that leads to a sort of cancellation of meaning. Phrases such as ‘not old, not young, a viable diable age’ (3, 92, 327, 164) highlight the character’s status as living dead, the ontological question for the ghosted twins is thus displaced and becomes: ‘to be and not to be’.

17In these examples, the ghost logic finds a linguistic realisation as presence flirts with absence, stressing the notion that specularity is at the heart of spectrality. In other words, Roy seems to generate a spectral stylistics.

18If Roy’s ghost is linked to the notions of regression, of dwindling and if it comes to mean a being on the verge of exhaustion, it turns out to have an opposite function in SV and MC. Indeed, in these novels, which are comic and ‘high spirited’, the ghost rather conveys the idea of a being that cannot help coming back and holds a promise of regeneration thus assuming a much more optimistic aspect.

19The ghost condition, a combination of wandering, invisibility and mutation has more to do with migration than haunting in his novels. Rushdie’s definition of the migrant is evocative of ghosts: ‘the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis... that is the migrant condition’.19 In the incipit of SV, the space of migration perfectly matches the image of limbo: the characters, like spirits, lightly float in the air between India and England, come across ghosts, their features are blurred and they have a feeling of unreality. ‘Ghosting’ actually appears as an unavoidable condition for the migrant. Indeed, from the moment the migrant leaves his native country he is condemned to eternal wandering as is highlighted in the parallel between Satan and the migrant in the epigraph of SV: ‘Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition... without any certain abode... this is certainly part of his punishment that he is... without any fixed place, or space, to allow him to rest the sole of his foot upon.’

20Jankelevitch’s description of the exiled as having a ‘phantom-like life’ (‘vie fantômale’) provides a similar comparison with ghosts and could perfectly be applied to Gibreel in SV who becomes ghostlike and schizophrenic after his departure from India. Jankelevitch writes:

Le nostalgique est en même temps ici et là bas, ni ici ni là... à la fois multiprésent, ou nulle part.... L’exilé a ainsi une double vie... il est le citoyen, d’une autre patrie, d’une ville invisible, cette république est une sorte de présence absente, un Ailleurs atmosphérique et vaporeux, une ville pneumatique que l’exilé entrevoit par transparence et comme en filigrane à travers l’agitation de la ville étrangère.20

21This definition is also strikingly similar to Saleem’s definition of the ghost’s vision: ‘I discovered, in the basket, how ghosts see the world. Dimly hazily faintly... it was around me, but only just; I hung in a sphere of absence at whose fringes, like faint reflections, could be seen the spectres of wickerwork’ (381).

22In fact, most of the migrant characters in MC and SV are turned into ghosts precisely during or after their migration. Saladin and Gibreel become ghost-like on their way to England and Saleem when he migrates to Pakistan21 and he is then turned into a ghost by Parvati the witch in order to go back to India, hidden in the basket. But what is striking in these two novels is that the ghost-like condition can lead to regeneration. Taking advantage of his in-between position, the migrant, Saladin and Saleem in particular, is granted a new life.22 Rushdie explains: ‘ [migrants] lose the place. They lose the language and they lose the social conventions... so that they have to reinvent the sense of self’.23 He adds: ‘Migrants may well become mutants but it is out of such hybridisation that newness can emerge’ (Rushdie 1991: 210). And indeed, it is during his ghostlike (and goat-like) state that Saladin accepts his repressed Indian identity and eventually finds his body back. Saleem also exclaims about his ghost-like state: ‘trapped in the basket of invisibility, I was saved... by another transformation: something was fading in Saleem and something was being born’ (382). In other words, limbo, an eminently hybrid place, is turned into a space of regeneration, an idea Rushdie expresses in these words: ‘Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures, ... that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory’ (Rushdie 1991: 15).

23Spectrality is not necessarily a step towards vanishing but one that can preside over rebirth and an increase in being. Far from any residual value, Rushdie’s phantoms rather expand, as does Saladin who, while a monstrous ghost, spreads like a phantasma of the immigrant into London society and even haunts the dreams and consciousness of people. The definition given in SV: ‘now I know what is a ghost: unfinished business that’s what’ (540)24 emphasises the idea that the ghost is a state yet to be completed, opening on the future whereas Roy’s ghost was mostly linked to the past.

24Moreover, unlike the living characters in GST receding into the background and into limbo, Rushdie’s dead characters impose themselves on the living. The idea becomes explicit in The Moor’s Last Sigh: ‘ah the dead, the unneeded, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story... We, the living must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down’ (136-37). Ghosts are larger than life and even reach the status of characters in SV. Rekha for instance, Gibreel’s dead mistress, haunts him and keeps harassing him in a comic and lively way that could remind the reader of Woody Allen’s ghost of the mother in New York Stories.25 In parallel, Rosa Diamond’s ghosts (in SV) acquire such an insisting presence that they eat up Gibreel’s reality. Ghosts would then be closer to Djinns because they strive to stay with the living, to be given a solid body and dread going back to the limbo of the magic lamp. Haunting, in Rushdie’s novels would rather be tantamount to something that persists, lingers precisely because it refuses to disappear and only waits to be resurrected. This does not mean that ghosts are not connected to death and do not have a tragic dimension in MC and SV. One can think of the scary ghosts of the Pakistani war that haunt the Sunderbans and nearly succeed in attracting Saleem in their world, or of Rekha, whose death results from a tragic suicide (and murder). Nevertheless they often function as comic elements in MC and SV. Rekha, the fake ghosts of MC,26 or the ghost seen by Gibreel’s adoptive father and described as follows: ‘the glass had been visited by the most co-operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow’ (SV 21) are a good illustration of this other image of the ghost. Enormous, comic, nearly fleshed out, Rushdie’s ghosts, in MC and SV in particular, rely on the bakhtinian grotesque defined as follows: ‘principe matériel grandissant, indestructible, surabondant, principe éternellement riant, détrônant et rénovant’.27 They undeniably assume this positive value of the carnivalesque energy of renewal, they celebrate life.28

25The same notions prevail in the writing itself. Repetition in MC29 is not a mulling over but, combined with the absence of full stops, rather precipitates the rhythm, launching the reader in a forward and breathtaking dynamics which can sometimes put him off, as for instance in the description of the birth of Saleem’s son spread over 13 days and 3 pages. Even the narrative seems to obey a forward movement as it is constantly carried away in new directions by the irrepressible energy of Rushdie’s narrators. The latter cannot bear leaving secondary characters in the shadows and cannot help developing innumerable digressions that evoke Bunuel’s film ‘Le fantôme de la liberté’ (which Rushdie counts among his artistic influences).30 Such an outward exploration is thus to a certain extent opposed to repetition in GST which is a means of slowing down the progression of the narrative (as if to avoid telling the trauma) and may evoke a mechanism of reluctance (even though, as we will discuss further, it turns out to have another function as well).

26Once more, in SV and MC, limbo becomes a fertile territory as it comes to mean a stock of potential stories. When Rushdie explains in Shame: ‘all stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been’ (Shame 116), he echoes Julien Gracq’s notion of ‘phantom books’:

À chaque tournant du livre, un autre livre, possible et même souvent probable, a été rejeté au néant.... Et ces livres dissipés à mesure, rejetés par millions aux limbes de la littérature... ces livres qui n’ont pas vu le jour de l’écriture d’une certaine manière, ils comptent, ils n’ont pas disparu tout entiers.31

27Yet Rushdie, as you would expect of him, goes beyond Gracq’s remark when he engages from time to time in the resurrection of discarded ideas or characters. Indeed, some secondary characters of MC are developed into main characters in Shame: Omar and Arjumand Harappa are for example directly inspired by two midnight’s children and thereby acquire a second life.32 Some details of MC (the vasectomy campaign of the government and the image of ‘The free Radio’ in the character’s head) are excavated and turned into a short story entitled ‘The Free Radio’.33

28Roy’s and Rushdie’s conceptions of ghosts are thus undeniably different: ghosts evoke a dwindling process for Roy and a surplus for Rushdie, degeneration is opposed to regeneration, the residue to resurgence, stasis to mutation, absence to presence. Even the notion of reality is shaped by the double apprehension of ghosts. The paradigm of the spectre assumes its full meaning in the postmodern context of the exhaustion and of the impossible representation of reality, as if inaccessible reality made ghostly representations emerge. In GST the mute and ghost-like characters, the erosion of language, the prevalence of loss and the pervading feeling of unreality all point to this impossibility of representing reality. From that point of view, Catherine Bernard’s description of British contemporary novels could be applied to GST. She writes that novels are affected by ‘the demotivation of representation, the increasing insubstantiality of contemporary reality, and the prevalence of simulacra that disarm any ambition of representation.... Reality and selfhood prove equally exhausted... desperately “awaiting form”’.34

29On the contrary, for Rushdie, ghosts engage in a different relation to reality.35 Taking advantage of their formlessness to take on multiple appearances, and of their in-between condition to explore multiple worlds and realities, they celebrate the multiplicity of the possible whereas they reflect the exhaustion of the possible in GST. Ghosts for Rushdie reflect the inexhaustible wealth of reality which is and must always be reinvented: ‘this is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artefact, that is does not exist until it is made and that, like any other artefact, it can of course be unmade’ (Rushdie 1991: 280).

30And yet, in spite of obvious differences, Roy and Rushdie ultimately meet as regards language and its relation to the notion of ghost. The second acceptation of the ghost, as a step towards regeneration, actually prevails in GST as well, not as regards the characters but as regards the writing. If what remains, once the reader has read GST, is not the feeling of a gloomy novel, merely narrating the story of destroyed lives, of helpless and hopeless characters, it is because the lively creativity of language as well as the poetic quality counterbalance the sadness of the plot and of the characters’ fate. On the one hand the haunting quality of the writing, obtained thanks to the obsessive repetition of scenes, sounds and words, actually generates a deep throbbing and encompassing rhythm, close to incantation which participates in the lyricism of GST. The reader is ‘enchanted’ in the literal sense, rocked by chants. Besides, the ending of the novel also contributes to defuse the pessimistic dimension by undermining the notion of closure. The back and forth dynamic of the narrative (which is also that of the ghost) enables the narrator to end on the middle of the plot: the love scene between Ammu and Velutha just before the drama breaks. Not only is the last scene an ode to love but the last word of the novel, ‘tomorrow’, is also resounding with optimism.

31On the other hand, the erosion of language could be apprehended as a condition for its regeneration, the more words are torn away and dismembered, the easier it is to re-assemble them in a new order. The twins’ point of view on English as a foreign language provides such inventions. If they dislocate words, they at the same time give birth to new ones such as the humorous coinages ‘Margaret told her to stoppit. So she Stoppitted’ (141, 300) or: ‘a Mactor who did occasionally Fil’ (resulting from the wrong understanding of ‘filmactor’). They are thus engaging in a playful inventiveness.36

32This is where Roy meets Rushdie: in their perspective on language from the liminal position of postcolonial writers, haunted by the past and in-between two cultures and languages.

33‘Djinns and tonics’ (MC 201)

34The two novelists propose a sort of phantom linguistics that overshadows and haunts the English language. The more they reshape language and transgress rules, the more grammar acquires the qualities of ghosts and becomes blurred so that the ‘devenir fantôme’ also affects language. Words become as rootless and restless as ghosts (and migrants) and keep drifting between different grammatical categories: ‘the train yellowed and browned its way’ (MC 443), ‘a stethoscoped return’ (MC 11), ‘greenly-blackly she sails into my cell’ (437), ‘her secrets are leaking saltily out of her eyes’ (MC 105) or ‘a redly dead’ (GST 31), ‘a sadly swirl’ (GST 194), ‘roos moved cemently’ (139).37 Owing to this ‘grammatical derivation’ grammar, just as the ghost, is in perpetual transit. Sara Suleri’s analysis of postcolonial language could thus be reread in a spectral light: ‘the key term of the transaction imposed by the language of colonialism is transfer rather than power’.38

35In their novels, language has entered the limbo-like territory of what J.-J. Lecercle, inspired by Lacan, calls ‘the remainder’39: the other, uncharted, side of language from which inventions, Freudian slips and linguistic disorders stem. He defines it as ‘cet impossible à dire, ce que la constitution de la langue, avec son système de règles, exclut et ce qui fait retour’.40 ‘The remainder’ shares with ghosts the notion of residue and of what irresistibly comes back to haunt. Both novelists unearth a limbo-like state of language out of which inexhaustible inventions can emerge. They propose indeed exuberant coinages such as: ‘weatherwise’ (GST 83), ‘afternoon mare’ (GST 217), ‘quarterboiled’ (GST 104), or ‘sperectomy: the draining-out of hope’ (MC 437), ‘omniaudient ears’ (MC 443) and ‘half-and-halfer’ (MC 18).

36Spectral wandering also applies to the signified which is torn away from the signifier. Words acquire a fleeting meaning in these novels, they evoke spectral bodies or empty shells that can be inhabited by different meanings. The narrator in The Moor’s Last Sigh, redefines the word ‘bastard’: ‘Baas, a smell, a stinky-poo, Turd, no translation required. Ergo, Bastard, a smelly shit, like me, for example’ (The Moor’s Last Sigh 104). Estha offers a similar ‘reincarnation’ of meaning: ‘he always thought of Pectin as the youngest of three brothers with hammers, Pectin, Hectin and Abednego’ (195), or ‘Jolly Well was a deeply well with larfing dead people in it’ (GST 148).

37In their novels, the English language is indeed resurrected and so to say ‘possessed’ in an occult way. In GST it is for instance possessed by Malayalam (the language of Kerala) with the device of agglutination: ‘CocaColaFantaicecreamrosemilk’ (GST 300) ‘a green-wavy, thick-watery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless-bottomful feeling’ (GST 323).41 In Rushdie’s novels English is haunted by Indian consonances as is shown in Saladin’s elocution in which the buried Hindi accent reemerges like a ghost: ‘those long discarded vowels and consonants began to leak out of his mouth’ (SV 49), ‘how had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab?’ (SV 34, my emphasis).

38In other words, through the exploration of the limbo of language, both novelists provide an extraordinary inventiveness. They not only celebrate the inexhaustible resources of language but engage in revitalising it, reminding us that language, in a postmodern and postcolonial era, is indeed ‘unfinished business’ (SV 540).