"A Line of Yoricks. Salman Rushdie's Bastard Legacies between East and West"

This paper discusses Salman Rushdie’s “Yorick” as a complex palimpsest of literary, linguistic and cultural traces, locating it between and beyond two of the most exemplary texts of the Western canon: Hamlet and Tristram Shandy. Moving to and fro between Shakespeare and Sterne, Rushdie’s revisionary virulence heightens, parodies and exploits to the full the carnivalesque ‘motley’ character of Shakespeare’s fool and his equivocal heir, Parson Yorick. The image of the palimpsest helps unravel the intricate interlacing of the story’s textual and intertextual levels, beginning with its material source, the vellum possessed by Yorick’s family. Entering a battle between preservation and consumption, destruction and recreation, the reader is urged to ‘fill it in’ with Rushdie’s virtuoso pastiche of Elizabethan pedantry and witticisms and hysterical digressions à la Sterne. In the end, the narrator’s ironical self-editing transforms the psychoanalytic over-reading of the tragedy into a series of farcical events. His palimpsestic interplay of uncertain filiations and precarious affiliations disrupts linear, univocal transmissions of names, meanings, families, stories and texts. Although Rushdie’s story seems anchored to the literature of the West, the West itself is furtively re-inscribed by the author’s stereoscopic vision, becoming a hybrid parchment of spurious fragments and bastard characters.