10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 u rsula K luwicK Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre is associated with many literary movements and traditions: magical realism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, historiographic metafiction, and alternative history are some of the labels most frequently attached to his writing. Adventure fiction is not among them, and yet, upon closer scrutiny, Rushdie’s novels can be seen to frequently gravitate towards the adventure genre� Many of them can at least partially be read as adventure stories, starting with his first novel, Grimus (1975), in which a character wanders the world for 743 years after taking an elixir that makes him immortal� Having become tired of life, he arrives on Calf Island and embarks on a series of adventures as he attempts to reach the peak of Calf Mountain, where he hopes to regain his mortality� Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Light (2010), the two young-adult novels Rushdie wrote for his two sons, exhibit a similar basic structure: the protagonists’ ultimate goals can only be reached after they have successfully passed through various adventures� Haroun sets out to save his father by restoring his gift of storytelling in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Luka attempts to capture the fire of life in order to prevent his father’s death in Luka and the Fire of Life� By contrast, The Enchantress of Florence (2008) employs a set-up inspired by the Arabian Nights in order to mix the joys and hazards of the act of storytelling with the perils and pleasures of the adventures narrated� In this novel, the exploits of Qara Köz, the eponymous heroine or “enchantress”, are related to the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great by Qara’s alleged descendant Mogor dell’Amore, who can only count on the emperor’s grace as long as he is able to interest him in his story� As with Scheherazade, the very act of telling hence becomes a precarious exercise, an adventure in its own right. Rushdie first employed the model of Scheherazade in Midnight’s Children (1981), but, while the first-person narrator Saleem in that novel frequently reflects on the construction of his narrative and is under high pressure to both complete his story and please his audience, The Enchantress of Florence puts much more emphasis on narrative crafting as a skill that can be put on trial� Here, the storyteller’s art is a matter of life or death� This shift to the act of telling as an integral part of adventure also links The Enchantress of Florence with Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte (2019)� In it, adventure brackets several textual levels, including that of the 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 196 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 extra-textual reader, whose attempts to disentangle the relations and echoes between the various narratives within the novel form an adventure in itself� This contribution explores the various forms and functions of adventure in Quichotte� I argue that Quichotte is a culmination of Rushdie’s engagement with adventure because the manner in which he employs this genre here speaks to one of the core concerns of his oeuvre: the role of cultural hybridity for the (re-)formation of personal and national identity� In Quichotte, Rushdie draws on a distinctly US-American version of the adventure genre, namely the road trip narrative, to engage with questions of ethnicity and race, which have always been central to his writing� The road trip narrative encapsulates mobility and as such is closely connected with a key value of Americanness: 1 in fact, one can argue that it has helped enshrine mobility as a core US-American characteristic� 2 As Pérez asserts, “mobility lies behind most versions of the myths that have shaped the construction of the modern American nation, with a collective journey as its genesis” (127)� The “road symbolizes ‘American-ness’” and “has been a central image and theme in American culture” (Pérez 127), also due to its close affinity with the American Dream as another version of mobility� But mobility has, of course, also always been a central component of Rushdie’s exploration of cultural, national, and personal identity, his engagement with the roots and routes of characters as well as countries. Hence, this chapter argues that, through his specific version of the road narrative as a US-American adventure genre, Rushdie explores Americanness and its discontents as an example of the resurgence of uninhibited nationalism and racism� On the Road with Quichotte Quichotte is part road trip narrative, part contemporary rewriting of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, part spy novel, part science fiction, part magical realism, and part metafiction: in short, a generic tour de force� The novel starts as a parody of Don Quixote� Rushdie’s protagonist is Ismail Smile, a travelling pharmaceutical salesman of Indian origin and without fixed abode who adopts the name “Quichotte” when he decides to set out on a quest� He is advanced in years and handicapped by a loss of mid-term memory caused 1 With “Americanness” I refer to a set of ideas about US -American national identity� See Cananau for a discussion of Americanness as a concept� 2 As Heather McFarlane argues about her own “broad” definition of the road trip narrative, “a major criterion is that the travelling itself is as important a part of the trip as the destination” (10)� Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 197 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte by “a dramatic Interior Event many years earlier” (Rushdie, Quichotte 5)� 3 In addition, his mental powers have been diminished by his addiction to junk culture, specifically “mindless television” (3), Rushdie’s contemporary version of the romances responsible for Don Quixote’s knightly delusions in Cervantes� The novel commences when Ismail Smile is laid off, but rather than being anxious about his loss of income, he embraces this development as a fortuity that finally sets him free: “‘Oh, not a problem,’ Quichotte replied. ‘Because, as it happens, I have to embark immediately on my quest’” (14)� Just as with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Quichotte’s “quest” is a measure of his delusion: he falls in love with a television superstar, “the delectable Miss Salma R” (13), famous US-American talk show host and former Bollywood actress, and sees his quest as a series of tests designed to ensure his worthiness of “the Beloved”� Quichotte conceives of these tests in terms of Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, a Sufi poem that structures the quest for enlightenment as a passage through seven valleys� Quichotte appropriates this model to give shape to his road trip through the United States, which he envisages as a steady progression through seven valleys - of the quest, of love, of knowledge, of detachment, of unity, of wonderment, and of poverty and annihilation - and towards his Beloved� Despite the clear mythical structure that this appears to impose on Quichotte’s quest, however, the trajectory of his journey remains essentially arbitrary, and so what is intended as an ordering principle becomes a further symptom of Quichotte’s eccentricity� 4 Yet, in another sense, Quichotte’s mythical reading of his own quest is characteristic of the road trip narrative� According to Heather McFarlane, the road trip narrative “resembles the quest narrative in that some kind of internal trip always parallels the physical one” (21)� As she observes, the image of the road invites the idea of spatial as well as psychological progress: “The road, in its linearity and prescribed forward motion, naturally implies both physical and psychological movement” (ibid�), and this allows it to function, in Cohan and Hark’s words, as “an alternative space where isolation from the mainstream permits various transformative experiences” (qtd� in ibid�)� At the same time, however, the importance of the road trip in US-American culture means that individual experience is always related to a collective, national experience: 3 In what follows, unspecified quotations are from Rushdie’s Quichotte. 4 As Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher argue, the quest differs from adventure in its purest form with respect to the openness of the protagonists’ projects� While the heroes of the adventure genre have no clear trajectory but embrace adventure for the sake of it, quests have specific goals. As von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher note, however, quests can flip back into adventure when their primary impulse becomes the creation of adventurous situations rather than the achievement of certain objectives (5)� 198 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 “By extension […] a search for personal identity involves collective identity as well, reflected in the search for nation, community, or belonging” (ibid.). Hence the road trip offers a form for the exploration of individual in relation to collective identity against the foil of Americanness� This is relevant insofar as Rushdie sends two pairs of Indian American characters onto the road in Quichotte, whose experiences raise questions about racism and the place of non-white US-Americans in mainstream conceptions of Americanness. The first pair of travellers consists of Quichotte and his son, called Sancho after Don Quixote’s companion in Cervantes’s novel� But Rushdie’s Sancho is a different kind of creature altogether: he is, literally, a product of wish-fulfilment, a “parthenogenetic son” (154) created out of his father’s - Quichotte’s - deep need for a child� Rushdie here mixes Cervantes with Collodi, and henceforth echoes of Pinocchio become more obvious than references to Don Quixote� After having been wished into existence by Quichotte, Sancho at first only appears in black-and-white and only to his father. His memories are Quichotte’s and he has no independent existence of his own� Once he has in his turn dreamt up a talking cricket, the Disneyan Jiminy, however, Sancho is given “an insula” (101), a part of the brain which creates “consciousness, emotion, perception, self-awareness”, empathy, and other qualities that in Rushdie’s novel signify humanity. As a result, Sancho becomes a real fleshand-blood human being visible to all� Together, Quichotte and Sancho travel across the United States in a reversal of the typical set-up of the road genre in which white US-American characters either travel through their own country or through “an exotic destination” (Goldberg 20) such as Mexico, as tourists or drop-outs� While the travellers have more definite objectives in Quichotte - to find a path towards the Beloved in Quichotte’s case and towards independence and freedom in Sancho’s - the flexibility and spontaneity of the road trip nevertheless shape their journey, which also becomes an exploration of Americanness and of their place within it� The United States here are turned into the subject of the gaze of two men of colour who identify as Indian-American and to whom the road trip offers the opportunity to (re)familiarise themselves with their adopted homeland� This aspect is particularly noteworthy with respect to Quichotte, who, as a travelling salesman, has spent much of his life on the road but has hitherto remained detached from the people and places he has visited in his professional capacity� The road trip he undertakes with Sancho, by contrast, demands interaction with their surroundings� On their travels, they encounter many bizarre and dangerous situations which they have to master in order to pass on and, in Quichotte’s reading of their journey, become worthy of their goal� To the overlap of physical and psychological movement to which McFarlane draws Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 199 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 attention, therefore, Quichotte adds a mythological dimension which turns their trip into an almost sacred quest� It is consistent with this interpretation that one consequence of their journey is a purging: a brief reconciliation with Quichotte’s estranged sister, after which he gains access to the Beloved� At the same time, the prosaic nature of the road trip and the circumstances under which Quichotte reaches his goal ironically undercut this mythical interpretation and highlight the sordid reality of which Quichotte and Sancho are a part: Quichotte is only admitted to Salma R because he delivers drugs, and Sancho runs away after stealing from his aunt in a bid for independence� The road narrative finally becomes intertwined with science fiction and the apocalyptic when the fabric of reality begins to disintegrate and holes appear everywhere� Quichotte’s story ends ambiguously, on the brink of rescue or perdition as he and the Beloved prepare to pass through a portal to a neighbour earth� Intertwined with the story of Quichotte is the story of his author, Author, or Brother, a writer who, after a career of writing mediocre spy novels, wants to produce a work of ‘serious’ literary fiction. Brother is introduced in the second chapter of the novel, where the text suddenly moves to a different diegetic level, with the focus shifting to the “author of the preceding narrative” (21)� From this moment on, the two storylines alternate, with Brother reflecting on the novel he is writing even as his own story evolves� Like Quichotte, Brother is of Indian origin and, also like Quichotte, he is both estranged from his sister (“Sister”) and has a complex, also estranged relationship with his son (“Son”), who turns out to be a cyber attacker whom Brother is eventually forced to help recruit for the CIA� Brother reconciles with Sister just before her cancer-related suicide and also with Son, with whom he subsequently undertakes a road trip following the steps of Quichotte and Sancho� This road trip is very brief and takes up only a few pages of the novel, but this suffices for its function to become clear� Brother and Son’s trip is a repetition of and a comment on the one undertaken by Quichotte and Sancho: the second pair of adventurers visit the same places and encounter some of the same situations as Quichotte and Sancho, and in repeating his fictional characters’ road trip, Brother partly repeats and partly manages to rewrite the version of the trip he has written, above all with respect to his reaction to racism� In what follows, I discuss Quichotte and Sancho’s road trip as a re-encounter with a US-American reality shaped by racism before turning to the metafictional elements which turn the novel into a reading adventure. Rushdie employs metafiction, I suggest, to argue for the importance of literature as a comment on real-world events� Rather than offering an escape from reality, adventure literature, for Rushdie, permits an assessment of the troubles of this world� 200 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Escapism and the Road Back to Reality In his typology of formula stories, John G� Cawelti draws attention to the importance of the hero for the adventure tale: “The true focus of interest in the adventure story is the character of the hero and the nature of the obstacles he has to overcome” (40). Martin Green concurs, arguing that the specific journey the protagonist undertakes is determined by his personality, which “may be said to ‘generate’ or at least to characterize his adventures” (21)� What kind of adventure might one, then, expect from Quichotte? Surely one that satisfies all the rules of escapism, for Quichotte, the protagonist of the tale within the tale to whom the reader is introduced in the first chapter, is interested in little apart from mind-numbing television� Quichotte is old, unemployed, without a home, alone, and unloved, marked both physically and mentally by the “Interior Event” that interrupted his career in academia and journalism years earlier, and, due to his addiction to junk culture, he is linked to reality by the most tenuous of ties� Not only is he clearly no superhero, the first of the two main types of protagonists Cawelti lists for adventure, but he also seems inferior to a regular “one of us” (40) figure, Cawelti’s second type, as he appears to have far less heroic potential� Other characters regard him as hardly capable of leading a normal life, let alone fit for adventures: for them, he is simple, delusional, and unpredictable, not to be held accountable for his actions� In addition, as an immigrant of Indian origin who is frequently mistaken for a citizen of various countries associated with radical Islam, he is treated with suspicion by his fellow US-Americans and regarded as a potential terrorist� The objective of his quest, to win the love of Salma R, is met with general embarrassment and unease, rejected as harassment rather than saluted as romantic love� For the hero of an adventure story, this is an inauspicious beginning - or, as Rushdie’s narrator puts it: “Such stories do not, on the whole, end well” (10)� Quichotte, as the reader initially encounters him, then, is an anti-hero whose only investment is in escapism, and just as with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, his grand project is belittled and ridiculed by those around him� Indeed, there is a sense of melancholy about Quichotte’s inadequacy that links him to Cervantes’s knight of the woeful countenance� Rushdie’s narrator explicitly emphasises the fact that Quichotte used to have a far more adventurous nature and paints the picture of a character whose scope has been suddenly and tragically reduced: In his youth […] he had been a wanderer of a purer kind than the salesman he eventually became, had adventured far and wide simply to see what he could see, from Cape Horn to Tierra del Fuego, the ends of the Earth where all the colour drained Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 201 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 out of the world so that things and people existed only in black-and-white, to the eastern wastes of Iran […]� However, at a certain point in early-middle age the Interior Event changed everything� When he came to his senses after the Event he had lost all personal ambition and curiosity […]� (10) Here, we get an inkling of a character maimed by a personal catastrophe and changed from an adventurer driven by sheer wanderlust to a diminished version of his former self� Quichotte’s fading taste for adventure, therefore, expresses a fundamental personality change� With the “Interior Event” and his subsequent loss of interest in the world around him, Quichotte becomes divorced from life and from his fellow humans and retreats to the virtual reality of television junk culture� Indirectly, and contradicting the general identification of the adventure formula with escapism, the novel thus identifies a zest for adventure with a grounding in life. This innovative approach to adventure as the reverse of escapism becomes more pronounced over the course of the novel� Quichotte’s return to adventure brings him back in touch with the world around him and with the changes it underwent while he was not paying attention� By taking him out of his escapist comfort zone, his quest forces him to reconnect with reality and to look at society with newly perceptive eyes� In Rushdie’s novel, therefore, adventure does not consist in escaping reality but in seeing it clearly, in all its bizarre craziness� As one of the mantras repeated in Quichotte goes, “It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen” and “in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen” (7) - as, in this partly magically realist novel, indeed it does� It is his return to such a disconcerting reality after a long retreat that eventually turns Quichotte into a hero� The following scene shows the dynamics between the different versions of reality that come together in Quichotte’s quest� Sancho has just commenced his transformation from a wholly imaginary being into a real young man of flesh and blood, and Quichotte is attempting to teach him the parameters of his quest� In a nod to the parallel development of physical and psychological journey typical of the road narrative, he is also trying to determine their route towards New York with the help of a map, at the same time as he is explaining his quest with recourse to a mythological structure, the passage through the seven valleys adopted from The Conference of the Birds already mentioned� For Quichotte, there is an essential synchrony between “the sphere of the actual” and “the sphere of the symbolic” (105) which connects the two realms: “We may be after a celestial goal, but we still have to travel along the interstate” (ibid�)� 202 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 However, the harmony he sees between his metaphysical perspective and reality is tested when the two travellers are confronted with a very different view of affairs� Quichotte and Sancho are still studying the map of the United States when they are accosted by a young woman for whom a map in the hands of men of colour has only one possible explanation: ‘What is that? ’ the white lady said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the map� ‘You hatching some kind of scheme? ’ ‘We are travellers like yourself,’ Quichotte replied mildly, ‘so it is not unreasonable that we should map out our route�’ ‘Where are your turbans and beards? ’ the white lady asked, her arm extended toward him, an angry finger pointing right at him. […] ‘I think I can say without fear of inaccuracy that I have never worn a turban in my life,’ Quichotte replied, with a degree of puzzlement that displeased his interrogator� ‘You got a bad foreign look to you,’ the white lady said� ‘Sound foreign too� […] What’s your purpose? That map� I’m not loving the map�’ (125-126) Different conceptions of reality clash in several ways in this scene� On the one hand, there is Quichotte, whose understanding of the mythical import of his quest is the rock on which his self-image as a traveller rests� His mounting confusion and inability to comprehend his interlocutor’s fears and suspicions attest to the discrepancy between his view of life and hers and to his detachment from the climate of the post-9 / 11 USA� At the same time, what is also at issue here is an even larger discrepancy between conceptions of personal freedom and of what America should be - and, above all, whose it should be� The “white lady” has clear views on who counts as American: “You asking me where I’m from? Imma tell you where I’m from� I’m from America� Who knows how you got here� This ain’t a place for you” (126; italics in original)� Not only is she naturalising her own presence while simultaneously denying Quichotte’s right of residence in America, but by questioning how he “got here”, she is also challenging his right of free movement� Her suspicion about Quichotte’s reasons for consulting a map thus also constitutes an implicit negation of his right to explore and travel and, ultimately, to adventure� By contesting Quichotte’s right to travel, the “white lady” aggressively challenges his national belonging� Mobility has long been understood as a quintessential US-American trait. Brian Ireland confirms the historical longevity of this view: “In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner addressed a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the World’s Columbian Exposition, to argue that ‘movement has been [the] dominant fact’ of American history and American national character” (498, parenthesis in original)� This is linked to a “process of mythogenesis” (499) that connects the Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 203 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 journey with “significant themes in American history and culture” and turns it into a “distinctly American” experience (ibid�) as well as a “potent cultural myth” (500)� In this sense, mobility is an important element of collective US-American identity, and by disputing Quichotte’s right to move and travel, the “white lady” excludes him from this notion of Americanness� Indeed, by presupposing that his consultation of a map must have a sinister purpose, she denounces Quichotte’s mobility as a threat to Americanness� A first consequence of Quichotte’s decision to embark on an adventure, then, is a collision with what the novel suggests is a changed reality of which his retreat into the virtual world of television has left him unaware� 5 The “white lady” at Lake Capote is supported by a crowd of people, including the security guards, and both the numbers of the attackers as well as their support by those officially responsible for the security of all visitors show that with the spread of racism to his own segment of the population, i� e� South Asian immigrants, Quichotte can no longer ignore the rifts within US-American society and the hostility that is becoming increasingly palpable� The beginning of Quichotte’s adventure, then, takes him outside the world of motel rooms and confronts him with an animosity that breaks “that innocent trust in people he always had” (139), as Sancho realises� Quichotte initially retreats back into virtual reality: he wants to stay inside the safe haven of hotels and television, to “shut out” the world “with unfriendly white ladies in it” (131), and to abandon their adventure before it has really begun� Yet, now that he has reconnected with the present through his encounters with racism, escapism is becoming increasingly impossible� As Sancho realises, the world has “stopped making sense� Anything can happen� Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies� Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to� The whole thing has come apart at the seams” (138)� While reality initially remains comfortingly stable within their hotel rooms, outside it undergoes inexplicable changes� Sancho cannot rely on waking up in the same city as the one in which he fell asleep, nor does time seem to follow its usual course� Eventually, this reality also seeps into 5 The novel makes this argument about the fluctuation of racism against South Asian immigrants through Brother, who explicitly addresses the “confusing history” of people of South Asian decent in America when he thinks about the effects of various immigration acts and important events since 1790� As a background to his engagement with racism in the Quichotte narrative, he singles out the 1965 Immigration and Nationality act, after which it “turned out that hindoos were not to be a major target of American racism after all” but that they were “excused, in many parts of the USA , from racial abuse and attacks” (26), and the terrorist attacks of 9 / 11, after which people of colour suddenly came to “look Islamic” in the eyes of white US citizens: “There were too many hostile eyes looking at people like him now” (27)� 204 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 the previously secure space of the motel rooms and breaches the boundaries of Quichotte’s virtual haven when the television newsreader addresses him directly with news that concerns him (332-334)� While this might or might not be a hallucination, the news conveyed in this manner reconnects Quichotte with the world outside: reality will no longer be locked out� To face reality is a daring project for two men of colour in America� In the age of fake news, truth has become indistinguishable from lies, and the novel argues that this protects the perpetrators of racist violence, the more so because so many people “are too blind to see” (138) what is happening� Accordingly, in the valley of love, the second valley of the quest, Quichotte and Sancho are faced with nothing but hatred, and the town of Beautiful, through which they pass, becomes the site of an unmotivated fatal racist attack in which two Indian men are shot and one killed by a drunk (144)� The novel expresses the repercussions of this reality in the following questions, asked by immigrant characters: “Do we belong here? […] Is there a place for us in this America? ” (145)� What is at stake here is, of course, the very nature of Americanness and the collective identity the United States wants to endorse� These questions indirectly also trigger the re-commencement of Quichotte and Sancho’s adventure, which can partly be understood as an attempt to (re-) gain control over their lives and to forge an identity as South Asians in a frequently hostile America� This endeavour involves the development of a new perspective on the United States� Accordingly, after their experience of racist slander in the two valleys of the quest and of love, they are now sent through the valley of knowledge, in which, as Quichotte explains, all knowledge “becomes useless” (153)� As so often in this novel, this is ironic in more ways than one and, while Quichotte sheds some of his acquired encyclopaedic knowledge, the two men gain a much deeper insight into US-American society� Their road trip towards New York City takes them through a country that begins “to make sense” (ibid�) again even as it turns increasingly fragile and fantastic� This reconnaissance is made possible, on the one hand, through the structure of the adventure that gives meaning to their journey and, on the other hand, through an act of possession through language� Sancho asks Quichotte to teach him his native language as a sign of his belonging but also of his self-confident embrace of his hyphenated identity. His goal is to “speak to each other in that language, especially in public, to defy the bastards who hate us for possessing another tongue” (151) and thus to insert their immigrant identity into the US-American mainstream� He wants to make visible their own existence within and contribution to US-American reality and so to claim their own power to shape Americanness� Quichotte and Sancho’s adventure thus becomes an act of multiple defiances: Quichotte rejects both Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 205 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 conventionality and rationality in his pursuit of the Beloved and acquires dignity through his persistent investment in a dream that is not even deflated by the end of the world� Together, Quichotte and Sancho re-enact the quintessentially US-American adventure of the road trip as a form of mimicry and assert their right to mobility and to adventure, which the “white lady” from Lake Capote would deny them, in order to create their own version of the American dream. And, finally, through their “linguistic act of possession”, they demonstrate not only their own participation in US-American culture but, more generally, also that languages and words other than English “have rights over the land” (152)� Thus, their linguistic emancipation also recalls the “lost power” of cultural perspectives that have been suppressed by the white anglophone majority since the beginning of European colonisation and settlement of Northern America� It is worth recalling the imperial legacy of the adventure genre at this point� As Green highlights in his taxonomy of adventure literature, the various types of adventure he identifies “together give us the self-imagined history of the white race from 1700 on, as it expanded over the other four continents and its domination over the other races” (47)� The adventurer as explorer and what Ted Beardow calls “empire hero” long offered a powerful icon for the imperial project� Late nineteenthand early twentieth-century adventure tales “extolled the challenges and excitement of empire, promulgating ideologies of nationalism, race and empire” (Beardow 66), and authors of adventure fiction participated in, and contributed to, “a system of signs, values, and hierarchies” that allowed them “to write white, Christian, English, heterosexual identity into perpetual supremacy” (Kaufmann 519)� Adventure narratives also formed important vehicles for the spread of specific ideas of Englishness. As Ficke argues, adventure fiction was one of the “cultural tools that played a significant role in consolidating and disseminating definitions of Englishness, manhood, and British citizenship throughout the empire” (514)� However, it is not only in imperial contexts that the adventure genre is “explicitly associated […] with national identity” (Ficke 515) but also in a more nationally domestic sense� As McFarlane proposes in her discussion of the genre, the road narrative, as a specific sub-genre of adventure fiction, is closely linked to “collective national geographies and histories” (4) through its referencing of real places as they “intersect with the characters’ personal histories” (ibid�): “The process of physically covering ground and telling stories about it thus connects the personal to the collective� The act of writing road trip narratives is therefore also nationalistic, or representative of literary nationalism, since telling stories about real places reflects an exploration and claiming of the land or, conversely, the process of being claimed by the land” (McFarlane 206 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 4-5, italics in original)� In Rushdie’s novel, Quichotte and Sancho make the land tell their own stories when they reconnect with it through Quichotte’s native language� Quichotte feels “joined to his youth again” (152), and as the different places that have shaped his life are linked through language and description, he becomes more confident at expressing his own Indian American identity, thus claiming his place in US-American culture just as he allows America to claim its role in his personal history� At the same time, this individual act of repossession highlights the manifold linguistic traces of other cultures and peoples that are apparent in the place names on any map of the United States but whose legacy is frequently ignored or even suppressed� In this sense, this linguistic recovery is also a nationalist project that seeks to make visible the hybrid nature of Americanness� The notion that language shapes reality is a familiar argument within the context of Rushdie’s fiction, expressed most memorably in the words of a character from The Satanic Verses, who explains to a fellow immigrant - transformed into a goat-like devil upon his return to England - how racist power is exercised: “They describe us […]� That’s all� They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (168)� In Quichotte, Rushdie’s immigrant characters, Quichotte and Sancho, discover that they, too, can influence reality once they seize linguistic control: “The world settled down” (153)� Looking at their US-American environment through the lens of Quichotte’s native language and all its cultural resonances gives them “the illusion, at least, of comprehensibility” (ibid�)� Metafictional Puzzles and the Adventure of Reading The shaping of reality through language and the desire of making the world comprehensible through narrativisation are repeated in Quichotte on a different diegetic level, that of the fictional author of the Quichotte story, Brother. As mentioned before, for Brother, writing this new novel is an adventure in itself because it takes him out of his comfort zone of “commonplace fictions of the secret world” (22), i� e� his spy stories� With it, he turns to a new genre and a more ambitious project� This is both a national project, in the sense that Brother uses the Quichotte story to explore the present condition of the United States, and a personal project, because in writing about Quichotte, he also writes about himself, about his past, and about his position as another Indian American� At the same time, chapter 2, in which Brother is introduced, signals to the reader the beginning of a different kind of reading adventure, with its reference to the “author of the preceding narrative” (21) indicating a metafictional switch that turns the story of Quichotte into a tale within a tale. Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 207 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 The mutually reflective quality of the novel’s two levels is highlighted from the beginning� When Brother conceives the idea of his new novel, he is immediately aware of the relationship it bears to his own life: Quichotte is “a shadow-self he had glimpsed from time to time in the corner of his eye” (22)� But, as Brother also realises, the situation is more complex than this, as reflection is not a unidirectional phenomenon: “Quichotte himself might say […] that in fact the writer’s tale was the altered version of his history, rather than the other way around, and might have argued that his ‘imaginary’ life added up to the more authentic narrative of the two” (ibid�, italics in original)� And in addition, of course, there is another writer hovering in the background, the real author of Quichotte, Salman Rushdie, whose origins share some basic facts with his characters: “They were both Indian American men […], both born long ago in what was then Bombay, in neighbouring apartment blocks, both real” (ibid�)� These apartment blocks appear to be located close to the childhood homes of most of Rushdie’s protagonists, such as Saleem in Midnight’s Children, Saladin in The Satanic Verses, and Moraes in The Moor’s Last Sigh, an area which, as Rushdie has revealed in several interviews, also coincides with the location where he himself grew up� Without proposing any overt connection, the text playfully alludes to such parallels in order to highlight “the porous boundary between reality and fiction” which Nurnberg argues is “Rushdie’s real inheritance from Cervantes” (14)� Accordingly, there are refractions of Rushdie throughout the novel: Quichotte’s Beloved is called Salma R, and her assistant and lover uses the name Conrad Chekhov when he negotiates a delivery of drugs for her, an allusion to Rushdie’s adoption of “Joseph Anton” as a pseudonym during his years in hiding� As Patricia Waugh suggests, “the lowest common denominator of metafiction is to simultaneously create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction” (6), and this strategy is obviously emphasized in Quichotte: Rushdie not only openly encourages his readers to read Quichotte as a created fiction, but also to pay particular attention to the context of its production� As Lowdon argues in her review, “Quichotte is above all a novel about the traffic between fiction and reality” (n. p.), and over the course of the novel it becomes increasingly clear that this traffic is two-way. When Brother, the writer of spy fiction, is contacted by a CIA agent in order to help recruit his son, he recognises the plot of one of his own novels in the story he is told and of which he becomes a part� Unable to determine how much of this “is a fairy tale” (Quichotte 227), he comes to doubt even his own reality status� The “dizzying union of the real and the imagined” (229) gives rise to a vision of his own fictionality: “A third party, reading these accounts, might even, at a certain point, conclude that both were fictional, that Brother and Sister and 208 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Son were imaginative figments just as Quichotte and Salma and Sancho were. That the Author’s life was a fake, just like his book” (ibid�)� Like Sancho in an earlier passage, Author begins to suspect that he might merely be a character in someone else’s book� There are several aspects to this metafictional puzzle that turn Quichotte into an increasingly intense reading adventure� On the one hand, there is a Chinese-box effect as Rushdie adds yet another layer to his metafiction, making readers more aware of the extradiegetic narrator who reports Brother’s thoughts in free indirect discourse� The echoes between the two passages in question highlight the extent of the exchange between the various diegetic layers of the novel, which share and reflect each other’s concerns. Here is Sancho trying to find words for the third presence he feels in Quichotte’s mind: I get the weirdest sense that there’s someone else in here� […] It feels to me, at those moments when I have this sense of a stranger, as if there’s somebody under slash behind slash above the old man� Somebody - yes - making him the way he made me� Somebody putting his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories, into the old man the way the old man put that stuff inside me� In which case whose life am I remembering here? The old man’s or the phantom’s? (84) By stressing the importance of personal memories and experiences to the process of fictional creation and thus encouraging a biographical reading, Sancho indirectly reminds the reader of the real author, Salman Rushdie, as an additional presence behind the “stranger” who he senses has created Quichotte� Whose memories is the reader reading? Sancho’s, Quichotte’s, Brother’s, or Rushdie’s? And who authors what and whom? The text teases the reader with such questions, playfully turning authorship into a kaleidoscopic vision that changes at every turn� The novel starts with the Quichotte story and a strongly palpable but impersonal extradiegetic narrator, who intrudes in the form of comments and footnotes� 6 It proceeds to introduce Brother as the author of the Quichotte narrative in chapter 2, but he likewise appears within the context of heterodiegetic narration, with an extradiegetic narrator perceptible in the background that employs the same techniques for commenting as the extradiegetic narrator of the Quichotte story. The very first page of chapter 2, for instance, has a footnote to explain why Sam DuChamp will be called “Brother”: “This is partly because his relation- 6 For instance, the narrator uses a footnote to comment on the apparent “kindliness” of Quichotte’s cousin, Dr Smile: “But Dr Smile was by no means kindly in all matters� As we shall see� As we shall presently see” (12)� Hence, he positions himself as a guiding, and omniscient, presence that controls the manner in which information is shared with the audience� Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 209 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 ship with his estranged sibling, Sister, will be central to his story; but also for another reason, which will be given on page 31” (21)� The effect of this is threefold: first, this footnote stresses that Brother, even though introduced as the author of what the reader has just read, is also a character, thus emphasising the metafictional set-up. Second, the footnote draws attention to the extradiegetic narrator as author - or as posing as the author - of Quichotte� The reference to a specific page in the book which the reader is reading (the page on which the reason for the name of “Brother” is in fact really divulged) clearly accentuates the role of the book as an object in the reader’s hands and links the narrative voice with the extratextual reality. This is confirmed, for instance, by the fact that this footnote has been adapted for other publishing formats: the German translation, for instance, references page 46, while the e-book version of the novel uses the phrase “on this page” with “this” constituting a clickable internal link that leads to the footnote� By signalling its awareness of the specific medium and form of publication with which individual readers engage, the narrative voice also asserts its alliance with the reader’s world and its separateness from Brother’s� 7 Third, what this also means, however, is that the identity of the extradiegetic narrator of the Quichotte story is unclear� While the revelation that Brother is the author of this narrative would seem to invite readers to identify the intrusive narrative voice of the Quichotte chapters with Brother, or rather with a narrator invented by Brother, the fact that an extradiegetic narrator who uses the same communicative techniques is also present in the Brother story raises the question of how many different extradiegetic narrators there actually are in Quichotte� Gérard Genette insists that the “narrating instance of a first narrative is […] extradiegetic by definition” (229), but in a metafictional narrative, this rule does not necessarily hold� In Quichotte, the extradiegetic narrator of the first chapter might actually be closer to an intradiegetic narrator if viewed from the perspective of the entire novel, invented by another elusive author figure, intruding into Brother’s story through the extradiegetic narrator of chapter 2, and the shift between diegetic levels that this would indicate also implies the complexity of the narrative set-up of the novel as a whole� But the alternative, that one and the same extradiegetic narrator narrates chapters one and two, is almost more dizzying, as it would mean that the narrator who narrates the Brother story is also the narrator written by Brother as an element of the Quichotte story, thus creating a logically impossible state of affairs� 7 The narrator also addresses the reader of Quichotte directly, in the manner of an omniscient Victorian narrator, as “kind reader” (54)� 210 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 The ambiguous status of Rushdie’s narrator(s) suggests that the reading adventure is constituted by the metafiction of Quichotte� But there are other aspects that combine to make the novel the literary equivalent of an Escher painting� As already mentioned, the relationship between the two stories and the diegetic levels which they represent becomes progressively unstable over the course of the novel, turning readerly navigation between them into an intellectual challenge. There are significant similarities between the Quichotte and the Brother stories and Brother himself highlight the reflections between events and character constellations that link Quichotte’s story with his own� But the direction in which reflection works, or the identity of original and mirror image, becomes increasingly unclear as Brother’s life begins to reflect his novel as well� When he realises that he has invented a history of sexual abuse in his novel of whose correspondence to occurrences in his own family he was completely unaware, he also comprehends that the relationship between the story of his life and the story of his novel, as well as that between him and Quichotte, is less straightforward than it seems and that he is not necessarily the only one to dictate what happens: 8 “Now Quichotte and I are no longer two different beings, the one created and the one creating, he thought� Now I am a part of him, just as he is a part of me” (302)� Not only is the border between reality and fiction crumbling; their spheres are becoming intertwined and cause and effect interchangeable� The confusion of cause and effect, and of the relation between fiction and reality in general, is one of the staples of magical realist fiction, and Quichotte shares much with this mode of writing� From the moment in which Sancho appears out of thin air as Quichotte’s longed-for child, the novel mixes realism and the supernatural. Initially, this mixing seems to be confined to the Quichotte story, and the blurring of realms appears to be marked as strictly fictional. But if readers originally believe that it is only the tale within the tale that can be categorised as magical realist and that Brother’s story is firmly realist, the development of this narrative strand soon encourages them to revise their conception of the novel as a whole� Not only does Brother’s spy fiction begin to seep into his real life, as detailed above, but more distinctly magical occurrences eventually also demand a further readjustment of readers’ assessments of the novel. For instance, when Brother flies to London to be reconciled with Sister, his plane almost crashes� Brother sees the angel of death, “standing on the horizon and holding the aircraft in one hand and 8 Sister reveals to him on her deathbed that she was abused by their father but that she and her mother kept this knowledge from him, concluding that “You don’t know and you made it up without knowing” (299)� Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 211 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 shaking it”, and it is only when Brother toasts the angel to show him that he is no longer afraid of death that the angel relinquishes the plane: “The death angel bowed in recognition of the gesture, and let the jumbo jet go� With a brief shudder the aircraft settled back into its course” (280)� This appears to be a classical instance of literalisation, a favourite magical realist device in which a metaphor is taken literally and turned into reality� As Wendy Faris observes, this “implicitly suggests the linguistically determined nature of experience” (110), “celebrates the solidity of invention and takes us beyond representation conceived primarily as mimesis to re-presentation”, highlighting “the question whether words reflect or create the world” (115). In this sense, literalisation is intimately connected with one of the core concerns of both Quichotte and Don Quixote, namely the influence of words, language, and literature on reality and the world� In the novel, and expressed by the echoes and breaches of boundaries that I have described, the literary universe created by Brother affects the world in which he lives in multiple ways, the most concrete of which is the final metalepsis with which the novel ends: in a last attempt to survive, Quichotte and Salma walk through a portal that connects their own disintegrating earth with a parallel earth, and as they step through, Brother sees two minute human figures, his characters, about to enter his office through a tiny door (390, italics in original)� They are at the end of their adventure, on the threshold of a wonderland to which they are unassimilable (ibid�, italics in original) and in which they are hence unlikely to survive� But even as they are about to die, together with their author, as the novel suggests, the hope and the courage expressed by their very presence in Brother’s world become visible� The text foregrounds their achievement in having reached this point, and the final sentence leaves the tragedy of their impending death in suspense: “There they stood in the gateway, on the threshold of an impossible dream: Miss Salma R and her Quichotte” (390, italics in original)� Conclusion: The Necessity of Fictional Adventures and the Necessary Adventure of Fiction As I have argued, Quichotte’s reconnection with reality is a daring adventure after his extended retreat from the world around him, and it ends, in all likelihood, with his death� But his adventure is nevertheless necessary� With Macbeth, we might conclude that he “should have died hereafter” (5� 5� 17): after all, the world which he and his Beloved are about to flee is disintegrating, and Quichotte is old and his health poor� But such a terse conclusion would deny Quichotte’s impending death its meaning� In the ending that 212 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Brother and Rushdie write, the threshold which finally emerges as the end of Quichotte’s journey is redeemed as a worthy goal because it is a reminder of promise, of the value of risk even in the face of loss: Who knows what lies beyond it? But on this side of the door, there’s hope� There may after all be a life after death� He grasps her hand� She squeezes his hand� A long quest comes to an end� Here they stand in the Valley of Annihilation, with the power to disappear into the universe� And just possibly into something new� Quichotte, a sane man, understands that it won’t happen� But on this side of the door, it’s possible, for a few last moments, to set that knowledge aside, and believe� (389) This final moment before Quichotte and his Beloved pass over the threshold encapsulates the message the novel conveys about the power of literature� Literary fiction might not be able to step out into the real world and change it, but it can keep knocking on its door. The metafictional puzzle of Quichotte confronts its readers with numerous boundary breaches between fiction and reality, on every level of the text, with respect to plot, characters, and narrators, and the passage above, which directly precedes the final metalepsis, suggests that dreams about how reality, the readers’ reality, might be different can also form such breaches. On “this side of the door” is fiction, the world of Brother’s novel, and fiction, as the text makes clear, can construct alternative worlds that confront extratextual reality with its possible Others� In Quichotte, there is, of course, more fiction on the other side of the door, but this mise-enabyme only serves to underscore how fiction and reality can reflect and how they can bleed into each other� And it is because Quichotte realises this that he, the character whom all the others regard as mad, is redeemed as ‘sane’ in the end, just like his literary forefather, Cervantes’s Don� But Quichotte, of course, also contains a personification of the possibilities of fiction as a comment on reality: Sancho, the invented - fictional - character emerges as the sharpest observer and analyst of the reality within the Quichotte story� It is Sancho who notices that some people walk around with neckwear that resembles broken dog collars (a metaphoricalisation of unleashed, and mostly racist, violence), and it is Sancho who sees and acknowledges both that the world is coming “apart at the seams” and that “stuff” is being allowed to happen that most “are too blind” or “too determined not to see” (138). And so Sancho, despite being a flawed and selfish character in the tradition of his fictional father Pinocchio, also becomes a symbol of the power of fiction to register and communicate what is happening in this world. As Michael Wood argues in his review of Quichotte for the London Review of Books, “Rushdie’s Sancho is not an example of the power of fiction to turn fantasy Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 213 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 into reality, even within the story, although that is how we have to see him at first. He is an instance of fiction telling truths we can’t get at otherwise” (32)� Read like this, however, Sancho’s fate also contains a warning: in an increasingly chaotic, incoherent, and hostile world, Sancho becomes weaker and weaker until he finally disappears just as suddenly as he originally appeared in response to Quichotte’s wish, at the very moment when he reaches his own Beloved: ‘No’, she said […] ‘there’s nobody. Someone definitely knocked but there’s nobody here now�’ And then there was nobody there� (354) If Sancho represents the power of literature to analyse, describe, and convey truths about the world, this sudden disappearance foregrounds the importance of an audience willing to listen to what literature has to say� In the absence of an audience, the communicative power of literature fades away� Sancho is not a likeable character, but he does represent some inconvenient truths, and his disappearance is brutal in its shocking finality. The death of Sancho, the death of Quichotte, the death of Brother: all of these indicate how risky it is to face the world and reality head-on� All three characters set out to embrace this risk in a spirit of adventure: Quichotte begins a quest that takes him away from the bubble of mindless junk culture and that forces him to acknowledge and engage with a world turned hostile� Sancho initially accompanies Quichotte but eventually leaves him to gain his independence in a world which has never welcomed him, which maims him, and whose chaotic disintegration he only escapes by vanishing first. Brother, finally, leaves the comfort zone of the escapist spy fiction he has created for a very different kind of literary venture that, in allowing him to tackle his own past, leads him towards reconciliation as well as death� In Rushdie’s modern adaptation of the distinctly US-American road trip trope, these are three versions of the “picaresque hero whose adventures offer a critique of the society in which he operates” (Ireland 500). By pulling the reader into a metafictional labyrinth in which the different characters’ roads cross and crisscross across various self-reflexive diegetic levels, Quichotte points to the fundamental links between his characters’ adventures and the reader’s world and suggests that the manifold negotiations that take place in the novel, about national identity and belonging, about fiction, lies, and truth, are questions that concern us all. 214 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Works Cited Beardow, Ted� “The Empire Hero�” Studies in Popular Culture, vol� 41, no� 1, 2018, pp� 66-93� Cananau, Iulian� Constituting Americanness: A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature� Bern: Peter Lang, 2015� Cawelti, John G� Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture� Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1977� Faris, Wendy B� Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative� Nashville: Vanderbilt UP , 2004� Ficke, Sarah� “Constructing A Post-Victorian Empire: Rupert Gray, A Tale In Black And White�” Studies in the Novel, vol� 47, no� 4, 2015, pp� 514-531� Genette, Gérard� Narrative Discourse� Ithaca: Cornell UP , 1980� Goldberg, Paul L� “Reading the Road Trip in the Age of Globalization: Travel and Place in Pablo Soler Frost’s Yerba Americana�” Confluencia, vol� 28, no� 2, 2013, pp� 19-36� Green, Martin� Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre� University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP , 1991� Ireland, Brian� “Errand into the Wilderness: The Cursed Earth as Apocalyptic Road Narrative�” Journal of American Studies, vol� 43, no� 3, 2009, pp� 497-534� Kaufman, Heidi� “King Solomon’s Mines? : African Jewry, British Imperialism, and H� Rider Haggard’s Diamonds�” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol� 33, no� 2, 2005, pp� 517-539� Koppenfels, Martin von, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019� Lowdon, Claire� “Quichotte by Salman Rushdie review - The Satanic Verses author is back on fine form; A glorious reworking of Don Quixote�” The Sunday Times, 17 Aug� 2019, https: / / www�thetimes�co�uk/ article/ quichotte-by-salman-rushdie-review-rushdie-rides-again- 3gsjg8dr9� Accessed 5 Oct� 2020� McFarlane, Heather� Divided Highways: Road Narrative and Nationhood in Canada� Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2019� Nurnberg, Alexander. “Himself in Every Layer: Salman Rushdie’s Metafictional Take on Don Quixote.” The Times Literary Supplement, 6 Sept� 2019, https: / / www�the-tls�co�uk/ articles/ review-quichotte-salman-rushdie� Accessed 11 Sept� 2020� Pérez, Jorge� “The Spanish Novel on the Road: Mobile Identities at the Turn of the Century�” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, vol� 33, no� 1, 2008, pp� 127-151� Rushdie, Quichotte� London: Jonathan Cape, 2019� ---� The Satanic Verses� London: Viking, 1988� Shakespeare, William� Macbeth� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1990� Waugh, Patricia� Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction� 1984� London: Routledge, 2001� eBook� Wood, Michael� “The Profusion Effect�” London Review of Books, 12 Sept� 2019, https: / / lrb� co�uk/ the-paper/ v41/ n17/ michael-wood/ the-profusion-effect� Accessed 11 Sept� 2020�