Love, war and lexicogrammar: transitivity and characterisation in The Moor ’ s Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh is a most energetic piling up of different stories, but in the diversity so created there is also thematic unity, brought about most forcefully through the character of Aurora, the narrator’s mother – ‘most sharp-tongued woman of her generation ’ – and through the counterpoint of her relationship with her husband, the shadowy Abraham. This paper examines transitivity patterns in certain passages of the novel, showing how these lexicogrammatical features underpin the perception that it is Aurora in particular, but other women too, who dominate the narrative – and the men in their lives. More generally, the paper points up the value of transitivity analysis in explicating reader responses to characters in fiction. The narrator of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moraes (‘Moor ’ ) Zogoiby, sees his story as ‘A last sigh for a lost world, a tear for its passing. Also, however, a last hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns... and a set of rowdy tunes for the wake. A Moor’s tale, complete with sound and fury ’ (p.4). The sound and fury of love, regret, betrayal and conflict are, indeed, at the heart of the narrative, which, being told by one who has been destined to age at double speed (‘No need for supernatural explanations; some cock-up in the DNA will do ’ (p.145)), proceeds at a headlong pace. Belying its title, then, the novel is more breathless pant than sigh, and its rumbustious energy corroborates the view that Rushdie’s magic realism transforms ‘everyday, mundane actions into something more lively than life ’ (Casey 1995). The liveliest by far of all the characters in this zestful work is the narrator’s mother, 314reportedly also Rushdie’s own favourite creation: ‘The story revolves in the first place around one person, around the painter Aurora. For me as a writer, she is the most pleasing character I have ever invented and described ’ (Doerry & Hage 1996:155 [my translation]). It is Aurora’s energy that lies at the epicentre of most of the conflict in the novel, be this the tension between the comic and the tragic, the satirical juxtaposition o