The figure of the migrant is central in the work of Salman Rushdie. It is the fulcrum of a narratological, rhetorical, philosophical and metaphysical compound articulating a Weltanschauung oriented by what Edouard Glissant calls « circular nomadism ». In this unstable and unpoised baroque world, oscillation is maintained thanks to the convergence of the centre and the periphery, which become two versions of the edge. Transport is the name that the Greek language gives to metaphor: for Salman Rushdie, it is also the migrant. Metaphor, a rhetorical figure, derives from a mode founded upon substitution and rupture, according to David Lodge, after Jakobson. It is inseparable from metonymy, whose mode is associated with combination and contiguity, and it gives verbal shape and energy to the conjuring and evoking power which manifests itself in Salman Rushdie’s novels. This energy becomes the vehicle of a centrifugal conatus which draws the wr! iting towards the edge. The limit inscribes itself in the dialectics of continuity and discontinuity in so far as it is the beginning and the end. It is embedded in the body, in various metaphorical and poetic places, and in characters belonging to an intermediate space, to a hybrid reality where desequilibrium and disorder are rife. This thesis will analyse to what extent the avatars of the limit, be it geographical, rhetorical or semantic, create a bedrock in which this style can prosper. Generating a proliferation of meaning and forwarded by a poetics at the heart of which is the search for the « living power of metaphoricity », as suggested by Ricœur, it participates in a vertigo in the margins.
The vertigo in the margins in the works of Salman Rushdie. Metaphoric and metonymic strategies