1 Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, trans. Anthony Bonner, Borges: A Reader, eds. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981, p.100.

2 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, New York: Vintage Books, 1997, p.139. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text.

3 See Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West, New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990, pp.29-30.

4 ibid., p.204.

5 See “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say fatwa against Rushdie irrevocable”, Agence France Presse, 13 February 1999, International news, available from Lexis-Nexis, 12 September 2002, <http://www.lexis-nexis.com>; “Iran FM reasserts Rushdie death sentence amid conservative clamour”, Agence France Presse, 14 February 2000, International news, available from Lexis-Nexis, 12 September 2002. <http://www.lexis-nexis.com>; “Islamists in Iran again insist that Rushdie fatwa should stay”, Deutsche Presse-Agentur,13 February 2001, International news, available from Lexis-Nexis, 12 September 2002, <http://www.lexis-nexis.com>.

6 Salman Rushdie, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”, The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write, ed. Steve MacDonogh, Dingle, County Kerry: Brandon Book Publishers, Ltd., 1993; Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, p.15.

7 ibid., pp.15-24.

8 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991; Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, New York: Picador, 2000.

9 A great deal of twentieth-century Cervantes criticism centred around Americo Castro’s theory that Cervantes was motivated by his social status as a converso (i.e. of Jewish origin) on his father’s side (see Americo Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos espanoles, Madrid: Alianza, 1988). “Benengeli”, of course, comes from the name of the fictional Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, who supposedly wrote Don Quixote (of which the Spanish novel is supposedly a “translation” from the Arabic). And Erasmus’s Praise of Folly has been thoroughly studied as a source for Don Quixote, while “Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda” (a pseudonym for one of Cervantes’s [still unknown] literary enemies) published an unauthorized and scurrilous sequel to the novel in 1614, just as Cervantes was completing the manuscript for his own second part.

10 Paul A. Cantor, “Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use of Spanish History” in The Moor’s Last Sigh”, Studies in the Novel, 29, 3 (1997), 323-41.

11 ibid., p.323.

12 ibid., p.326.

13 ibid., p.327.

14 ibid., pp.322-5.

15 ibid., p.336.

16 Stephen Henighan, “Coming to Benengeli: The Genesis of Salman Rushdie’s Rewriting of Juan Rulfo in The Moor’s Last Sigh”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 33, 2 (1998). 55-74.

17 ibid.

18 ibid., 71. Hispanists, of course, are likely to balk slightly at this assertion given that most would probably locate the “foundations” of the Hispanic tradition at the very least in the twelfth-century Poema de Mio Cid, if not in the preceding Hispano-Arabic jarchas of the eleventh century.

19 ibid.

20 “Tales of the Alhambra”, 336.

21 Midnight’s Children, p.6.

22 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p.127.

23 Salman Rushdie, “The Moor’s Last Sigh: Charlie Rose/1996”, Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder, Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p.206.

24 Midnight’s Children, p.13.

25 ibid., pp.206-7.

26 Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. John Rutherford, New York: Penguin, 2001, pp.441-2.

27 “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”, p.20.

28 Timothy Weiss, “At the End of East/West: Myth in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh”, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4, 2 (2000), paragraphs 23-4. Available online: 9 September 2001, <http://152.1.96.5/jouvert/v4i1/weiss.htm>.

29 For more on Monipodio’s criminal significance, see Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp.37-50.

30 See Luis de Camoes, Os Lusíadas, J.D.M. Ford, ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1946.

31 Compare this to Don Quixote’s own nostalgia for the golden age in Part I, Chapter XI (pp.84-5).

32 Don Quixote, pp.45-7.

33 Incidentally, Rushdie has also established other important intertextualities here with the work of E.M. Forster: Raman Fielding shares his surname with one of the central characters from A Passage to India, while “Moraes” itself is the surname of one of the central figures in Forster’s story “The Other Boat”. The importance of this connection to Forster will be discussed later.

34 See “The Moor’s Last Sigh: Charlie Rose/1996”, pp.202-3.

35 I refer, of course, as does Rushdie himself, to Don Quixote’s lady “Dulcinea del Toboso”, whose “real” name is “Aldonza Lorenzo”.

36 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, trans. Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, New York: Grove Press, 1962, pp.89-101.

37 ibid., p.97.

38 See Carmen M. del Rio, “Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard’ or Where is the Text?”, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 25 (1978), 463.

39 “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, p.99.

40 See Tamara Holzapfel and Alfred Rodriguez, “Apuntes para una lectura del Quijote de Pierre Menard”, Revista Iberoamericana, 43 (1977), 671-7; John Incledon, “La obra invisible de Pierre Menard”, Revista Iberoamericana,43 (1977), 665-9; Emir Rodriguez Monegal, “Borges, the Reader”, Diacritics,4 (1974), 41-9; George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford: OUP, 1975; and Michael J. Wreen, “Don Quixote Rides Again!”, Romanic Review, 86 (1995), 141-63.

41 “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, p.101.

42 Jorge Luis Borges, The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems, trans. Alastair Reid, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976, p.67. The original Spanish reads: “Crueles estrellas y propicias estrellas/Presidieron la noche de mi genesis;/Debo a las ultimas la carcel/En que sone el Quijote” (see Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 1974, p.1092).

43 See Luis Andres Murillo, “Introduccion biografica y critica”, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, Madrid: Castalia, 1978, p.24.

44 Midnight’s Children, p.47; The Ground Beneath Her Feet, p.300.

45 See “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”, p.52.

46 “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”, p.17.

Salman Rushdie,Author of the Captive’s Tale

Abstract