Roxana Doncu ∗ THE TRANSNATIONALISM OF SALMAN RUSHDIE: FROM A CONTRAPUNTAL TO A METAMORPHIC READING OF HISTORY Keywords: postcolonialism; transnationalism; globalization; migrant identity; metamorphosis Abstract: One of the possible ways to conceptualize transnationalism is to analyze the special kind of consciousness it has given birth to, marked by dual or multiple identifications. A post-colonial writer concerned with what it means to be a migrant or diasporic subject, Salman Rushdie starts from what Said has called a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of history, the setting against one another of home and host country in The Satanic Verses, where the fall from the sky of both Gibreel and Saleem embody “the unhealable rift . . . between the self and its true home” (Said). However, in his subsequent novels, the contrapuntal reading makes way for a plural and metamorphic reading of history. The initial awareness of the split self changes into an awareness of the irreducible plurality of the self’s identifications with the multiple histories of the spaces and times it inhabits. Thus in his following novels Rushdie gravitates towards a new understanding of the migrant’s identity as metamorphic, constantly changing in response to its environment. This new conceptualization of migrant and diasporic identities as metamorphic points to the emergence of a transnational consciousness, fostered both by postcolonial history and globalization. Introduction: exile as contrapuntal experience In one of Said’s most famous meditations on the condition of exile The Mind of Winter he borrows the term ‘contrapuntal’ from music theory (contrapuntal motion) and applies it to the experience of exile: “For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environment are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (442). He speaks about other contrapuntal juxtapositions occurring in the way one apprehends exile, then goes on to characterize the condition of exile as that of “the mind of winter”, which is refused both the ‘pathos’ of summer and autumn and the potential of spring. The contrapuntal is therefore taken to its logical development into a ‘mind of winter’, a cold unproductive medium from which nothing new can ever emerge. In music contrapuntal motion appeared as part of polyphonic music, which gradually came to replace the traditions of homophonism/monophonism in the Renaissance. In Renaissance music theory, contrapuntal motion was understood as a way to achieve a higher harmony, a way of progress towards perfection: from dissonance to imperfect consonance to perfect consonance” (Christensen 105). The voices that ∗ “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania. 107