WRITERS AND THEIR WORK
I SOBEL A RMSTRONG
General Editor
SALMAN RUSHDIE
SALMAN
RUSHDIE
Damian Grant
Second Edition
# Copyright 1999 & 2012 by Damian Grant
First published in 1999 by Northcote House Publishers Ltd, Horndon, Tavistock,
Devon, PL19 9NQ, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 (0) 1822 810066 Fax: +44 (0) 1822 810034.
Reprinted 2007
Second edition 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or stored in an
information retrieval system (other than short extracts for the purposes of review)
without the express permission of the Publishers given in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-7463-1162-2
Typeset by PDQ Typesetting, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom
For Fiona, Fergus, and Marcus;
and, this time, for Madeleine
Contents
Acknowledgements
viii
Biographical Outline
ix
Abbreviations
xi
1 Introduction
1
2 Grimus
27
3 Midnight’s Children
38
4 Shame
57
5 The Satanic Verses
71
6 Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West
94
7 The Moor’s Last Sigh
107
8 Interchapter
123
9 The Ground Beneath Her Feet
126
10 Three Novels for the New Millennium
147
11 Conclusion
175
Notes
185
Select Bibliography
202
Index
214
vii
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the University of Manchester for the grant of
sabbatical leave during 1997. Also to the universities of Burgundy
and Lille, York, and again Manchester, for invitations to conferences at which some of the material included here was proposed
and discussed. I would also like to express my thanks for the
conversation and encouragement of Madeleine Descargues. She
knows what we both owe to Sterne and Rushdie; resembling
Padma in nothing else, she has talked this project forwards.
viii
Biographical Outline
1947
1954
1961
1964
1965
1968
1969
1970
1974
1975
1976
1979
1981
1983
1984
1986
Salman Rushdie born in Bombay, the only son of Anis
Ahmed Rushdie, a businessman who had received his
education in Cambridge, and his wife, Negin. There are
three sisters in the family.
Rushdie attends an English Mission school in Bombay.
Rushdie sent to England for his secondary education, at
Rugby School.
The family moves to Pakistan: Karachi.
Goes to Cambridge (King’s College) to read history. No
longer a believer, develops a historical interest in Islam.
Becomes involved in acting with the Cambridge Footlights,
and addicted to the cinema.
Returns to Pakistan; works briefly in television before
returning to London, where he joins a company of actors.
Works as a copywriter for advertising agencies, taking time
out to write a first (unpublished) novel on Indian themes.
Meets Clarissa Luard.
Five-month trip to India and Pakistan.
February: first published novel Grimus. Political involvement with black and Asian groups in London.
April: Marries Clarissa Luard.
June: son Zafar born. Gives up copywriting job to write
fiction full-time.
February: Midnight’s Children published to critical acclaim.
October: wins the Booker Prize.
September: third novel Shame published. Begins work on
what was to become The Satanic Verses.
Travels to Australia with the writer Bruce Chatwin. Meets
Robyn Davidson.
Travels to Nicaragua at the invitation of the Sandinista
ix
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
Association of Cultural Workers. Meets the American
novelist Marianne Wiggins.
January: The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey published.
Divorced from his first wife. Marries Marianne Wiggins.
September: The Satanic Verses published. The novel is
denounced in India and Pakistan, and burnt in the street
in Bradford.
14 February: announcement of the fatwa against Rushdie by
the Ayatollah Homeini, and offer of a reward by the State of
Iran for his murder. Rushdie goes into hiding, under the
protection of the British Government with Special Branch
police bodyguards. The ‘Rushdie Affair’ attracts international attention, stimulating anti-Islamic feeling in the
west. Formation of Rushdie support groups in England,
France, and elsewhere. The British Government makes
representations to Iran without success. Separation from
Marianne Wiggins.
Publication of several books on the Rushdie Affair.
September: Haroun and the Sea of Stories published.
March: Imaginary Homelands: Essays 1981–1991 published;
includes a last section devoted to essays and addresses
which provide Rushdie’s own perspective on his situation.
March: The Wizard of Oz published by the British Film Institute.
October: collection of stories East, West published.
September: The Moor’s Last Sigh published.
Writes introduction to Burning Your Boats, the collected
short stories of his friend Angela Carter, who had died in
1992.
Publication of anthology The Vintage Book of Indian Writing
1947–97, edited with Elizabeth West. Marries Elizabeth
West. July: second son Milan born. September: writes
controversial article in The New Yorker on the death of
Princess Diana in a car accident, linking this event with
David Cronenberg’s film of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash.
February: on the ninth anniversary of the fatwa, which is
reasserted in Iran, Rushdie meets Tony Blair to discuss
diplomatic moves. Speaking on BBC television, declares his
belief in the absolute right of free speech. September: the
Iranian Government officially distances itself from the
fatwa. Rushdie says: ‘It looks like it ’s over. It means
everything. It means freedom.’
x
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
1999
2000
2001
2003
2004
2005
2007
2008
2010
2011
Publication of The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Meets Padma Lakshmi, at the launch party for Talk
magazine in New York.
(April) Travels with his son Zafar to India.
Moves to New York, expressing his frustration with literary
London.
Publication of Fury, weeks before the September 11 attacks
on the Twin Towers.
Publication of Step Across This Line, essays and other pieces
from the previous ten years, including many from the New
York Times and the New Yorker.
Divorces Elizabeth West; marries Padma Lakshmi.
Publication of Shalimar the Clown.
(June) Rushdie is offered and ’humbly accepts’ a knighthood ’for services to literature.’
Divorce from Padma Lakshmi (July).
Takes up a five-year appointment at Emory University,
Atlanta, which had bought his archive in 2006.
Publication of The Enchantress of Florence.
Wins an injunction against one of his former bodyguards,
who was publishing a tendentious account of his ’lost
years’ in a tabloid newspaper.
Midnight’s Children is selected as the best Booker prizewinner over forty years, repeating the selection in 1993 for
the Booker’s 25th anniversary.
Publication of Luka and the Fire of Life, written for his second
son Milan.
Rushdie reveals that he is writing a memoir of his ten ‘lost
years’.
Collaboration with director Deepa Mehta on a film of
Midnight’s Children, to be called Winds of Change.
(May) After the death of Osama bin Laden, Rushdie writes
an article suggesting that it is time for Pakistan to be
declared ’a terrorist state’ and ’excluded from the comity of
nations’.
(June) Announces he is to write a TV series, to be called The
Next People, which will ’deal with the fast pace of change in
modern life’. Thus: ’for the first time in my writing life, I
don’t have a novel on the go, but I have a movie and a
memoir and a TV series’.
xi
Abbreviations
EF
EW
F.
G.
GBF
HSS
IH
JS
LFL
MC
MLS
S.
SAL
SC
SV
WO
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008)
East, West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994)
Fury (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001)
Grimus (London: Paladin, 1989)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta Books/
Penguin, 1990)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991)
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (London: Picador,
1987)
Luka and the Fire of Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010)
Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981)
The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995)
Shame (London: Picador, 1984)
Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002
(London: Vintage, 2003)
Shalimar the Clown (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003)
The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988)
The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI, 1992)
xii
. . . some incredibly important things were being fought
for here: being important to me, the art of the novel;
beyond that, the freedom of the imagination, the great
overwhelming, overarching issue of the freedom of
speech and the right of human beings to walk down
the streets of their own country without fear.
Salman Rushdie, Guardian, 26 September 1998
xiii
1
Introduction
IMAGINATION AND THE NOVEL
Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time not
unlike our own of international tension and political uncertainty
that entailed threats to personal liberty and freedom of thought,
and when he himself had been victimized for atheism, the poet
Shelley wrote a Defence of Poetry, which has become celebrated
for its definition of the role of the imagination in the discovery
and direction of our lives. Laws and conventions deriving from
‘ethical science’ may be necessary, he concedes, for the conduct
of ‘civil and domestic life’, but it is the imagination that unlocks
our full humanity. ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
intensely and comprehensively’, divining a more profound
morality beyond the scope of rational requirement. ‘The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry
administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.’1 And at
the end of the twentieth century, many wars, revolutions, and
anathemas later, we are if anything even more aware that the
active exercise of the imagination is indispensable to the
realization, establishment, and defence of those values which
define us and according to which we try to live our lives. In what
amounts to a near paraphrase of Shelley, the subject of this
study, Salman Rushdie, insists that the imagination, ‘the process
by which we make pictures of the world . . . is one of the keys to
our humanity’ (IH 143).
It is also true that the appeal to the imagination, then as now,
invites rather than evades argument. In that extraordinarily
modern document from the early eighteenth century, A Tale of a
Tub, Swift identified the imagination as that which gives access
to the whole spectrum of human potential, leading us ‘into both
1
SALMAN RUSHDIE
extreams of High and Low, of Good and Evil‘. As if to prove
Swift’s point, what Dr Johnson reproves as a ‘licentious and
vagrant faculty’ is later enshrined as a principle of perception
and expression by the romantics: Coleridge’s ‘shaping spirit of
Imagination’.2 But, from the start, apologists for the novel had
invested less heavily in the imagination, relying more on
observation and documentation – though Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, with its focus on ‘what passes in a man’s own mind’,
provides an important qualifying instance. Emile Zola specifically ejected the imagination from his theory of the novel,
arguing that a properly scientific method had no use for it.3 In
the present century, all the claims and counter-claims for and
against the role of the imagination in fiction have become
simultaneously available, from Henry James’s sacramental views
in The Art of the Novel (1934) through the liberties of the sciencefiction writer, fantasist, or ‘magic realist’, to Samuel Beckett’s
paradoxical vision of the cessation of all mental activity in
Imagination Dead Imagine (1965). And those writers sometimes
described as ‘from elsewhere’, typically those with a postcolonial background, have a specially difficult negotiation to
make in this respect. One thinks of the strenuous theorizing of
the Guyanian writer Wilson Harris, who has argued that ‘a
philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of the
imagination’, and believes that the dynamism of cultural
admixture ‘lies in the evolutionary thrust it restores to the
orders of the imagination’. Harris has both sponsored (in his
essays) and exemplified (in his novels) that ‘counter-culture of
the imagination’ which he sees as the most positive and creative
response to the colonial experience, in what is to be understood
as a ‘quest for new values’.4 And it is here, in this contested
space, that we must locate the work of Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie’s own formulations of his project most often involve
reference to the imagination as the agent of synthesis or
transformation. It is the imagination that liberates us from the
crude ‘facts’ of history (other people’s history), and that may
even absolve us from the unredeemed diary of our own lives. It
will be worthwhile, therefore, to consider what Rushdie has to
say in his essays about the presiding power of the imagination,
and then to see how this might help us in our approach to the
novels. One of the things that we learn from these essays is that
2
INTRODUCTION
for Rushdie, as a postmodern writer, there is no such thing as an
unqualified fact, nor an absolute fiction; the two categories
necessarily overlap and leak into each other. He quotes an
apposite observation from Graham Greene in this respect:
novelists and journalists are antagonistic, today, because ‘novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to
write fiction’ (IH 217). Rushdie sees Julian Barnes’s History of the
1
World in 10 2 Chapters as ‘the novel as footnote to history’, ‘not a
history but a fiction about what history might be’ (IH 241).
Calvino’s Sister Theodora (in The Non-Existent Knight) writes her
chivalric story from the protected ignorance of her convent,
‘inventing the unknown, making it seem truer than the truth’,
while the Marquez whom Rushdie refers to as ‘Angel Gabriel’ has
the ability, through the extraordinary power of his imagination, to
‘make the real world behave in precisely the improbably
hyperbolic fashion of a Marquez story’ (IH 257, 300). Pynchon’s
novels represent for Rushdie ‘a rich metaphorical framework in
which two opposed groups of ideas [pessimistic entropy and
optimistic paranoia] struggle for textual and global supremacy’,
and this novelist has the capacity to let these differently
sponsored worlds inform each other; ‘his awareness of genuinely
suppressed histories . . . always informed his treatment of even his
most lunatic fictional conspiracies’ (IH 269).
The novelist’s mistrust of history is pervasive; but it is not only
novelists who can challenge official versions of the truth. ‘In the
aftermath of the Kennedy assassination,’ suggests Rushdie in the
essay just quoted (on Eco), ‘the notion that ‘‘visible’’ history was a
fiction created by the powerful, and that . . . ‘‘invisible’’ or
subterranean histories contained the ‘‘real’’ truths of the age,
had become fairly generally plausible’. But the novelist is the one
explicitly dedicated to that form which ‘allows the miraculous and
the mundane to co-exist at the same level’, in which ‘notions of
the sacred and the profane’ can be simultaneously explored (IH
376, 417). And this is the basis of his own defence of The Satanic
Verses:
I genuinely believed that my overt use of fabulation would make it
clear to any reader that I was not attempting to falsify history, but to
allow fiction to take off from history . . . the use of fiction was a way of
creating the sort of distance from actuality that I felt would prevent
offence from being taken. (IH 409)
3
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Rushdie tersely adds here: ‘I was wrong.’ But whatever the risks
involved in attempting a synthesis of fact and fiction, the
separation of the two offers an even bleaker prospect. Facts by
themselves will get the writer nowhere: ‘where the strength for
fiction fails the writer, what remains is autobiography.’ The
trouble with another writer’s work, Rushdie protests, is that he
‘will not let it take off . . . he scarcely ever lets the fiction rip’; and
‘the distrust of the narrative . . .undermines all the intelligence,
all the image-making, all the evocative anecdotes’ (IH 150, 290).
By the corresponding argument, fiction by itself – without the
ballast of real history, the gravitas of real experience – will tend
to float off into triviality. ‘There is a difference between invention
and imagination,’ he maintains in another context; the first
provides (even in a war reporter) ‘make-believe’, where the
second will offer ‘reliable accounts of the horrific, metamorphosed reality of our age’ (IH 204). One thinks of the criticism of
surrealism made by Wallace Stevens, that it ‘invents without
discovering’5 – playing unserious games, conducting hypotheses
with no control and therefore ultimately no interest.
It is the imagination that negotiates between the two
categories, and Rushdie’s cumulative account of the role and
function of the imagination – in writers and film-makers alike –
is almost always positive. The real frontiers of fiction ‘are neither
political nor linguistic but imaginative’ (IH 69): the imagination
knows how to transcend boundaries, in the way Wilson Harris
argues it must if the new voices in the new literatures are to be
heard in the world. It is only through an exercise of imagination
that we can take part in the project of what is now a global
culture, write the ‘books that draw new and better maps of
reality, and make new languages with which we can understand
the world’ (IH 100). The recurrent metaphor of the map reminds
us just how territorial the imagination may be. In an important
essay from 1985 entitled ‘The Location of Brazil’ (IH 118–25), on
Terry Gilliam’s futuristic film, Rushdie explains: ‘It is not easy . . .
to be precise about the location of the world of the imagination. . . . But if I believe (as I do) that the imagined world is, must
be, connected to the observable one, then I should be able,
should I not, to locate it; to say how you get from here to there.’
The problem is, ‘the more highly imagined a piece of work, the
more ticklish the problem of location becomes’. Where is Oz,
4
INTRODUCTION
where is Wonderland? Where is Apocalypse Now set? Where, for
that matter, should we locate Swift’s Lilliput, or Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon: where are all those ‘secondary worlds’, as Tolkien
called the fictional creations of the artist.6 The spatial metaphor
will obtain only so far; then there is a collision, a war between
these worlds that will gravitate towards each other.
Gilliam’s film tells us ‘something very strange about the world
of the imagination – that it is in fact at war with the ‘‘real’’ world,
the world in which things inevitably get worse and in which
centres cannot hold’. And this war is what literature is really
about; whether in terms of the real wars of War and Peace and The
Red Badge of Courage or the metaphorical wars of Milton and
Blake: the war and peace in heaven and hell. Elsewhere,
Rushdie quotes Richard Wright as saying that ‘black and white
Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality’ (IH
13), and this is the war he sees himself as fighting in this essay.
The compulsion of the artist tells him: ‘Play. Invent the world.’ But
the ‘play’ is serious: ‘the power of the playful imagination . . . to
change forever our perception of how things are’ has been
demonstrated, he argues, by Tristram Shandy as well as by Monty
Python. (It is an exemplary case that the novelist Sterne
contended with the philosopher Locke precisely over the nature
of the imagination, and the capacity of language to represent its
processes.) For Rushdie, the modern world is ‘as much the
creation of Kafka . . . as it is of Freud, Marx, or Einstein’. And it is
at this point in his essay that Rushdie links the idea
of change to that of the new ‘migrant sensibility’: ‘the effect of
mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of
human beings: people who root themselves in ideas rather than
in places.’ Virginia Woolf proposed that ‘human character
changed’ in 1910;7 Rushdie implies that 1947 would be a better
date – or, the decade preceding this that saw such enforced
migrations on a world scale. But this is, after all, a film review,
and Rushdie concludes that the cinema itself is perhaps the
place where the new may germinate: ‘And for the plural, hybrid,
metropolitan result of such imaginings, the cinema, in which
peculiar fusions have always been legitimate . . . may well be the
ideal location.’ If new sensibilities require new forms (as they
do), then Rushdie is an enthusiastic proponent of these: not only
film, but also radio, the gramophone, television, video . . . all find
5
SALMAN RUSHDIE
their place as both narrative material, structural device, and
metaphor in his fiction. And in the late twentieth century, this is
indeed the location of culture. As Steven Connor remarks, if
Rushdie exploits the media in his fiction it is because ‘such forms
are the evidence of a fundamentally new relationship between
public and private life’.8
The argument of this essay lies at the heart of Rushdie’s
understanding and practice; as we shall see, all the significant
critical disagreements can be referred back here, at least for
clarification. It provides the argument to back his earlier
assertion that ‘Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both
groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for
the same territory’ (IH 14). It also links Rushdie to the
mainstream of post-colonial culture, where the spatial metaphor
has a particular appositeness. Many writers within this tradition
see the imagination as defining a ‘space’ which is more
metaphorical than actual. Homi Bhabha quotes Wilson Harris
on the need to face up to the ‘void’, the ‘wilderness’ of realities
denied, in proposing his own idea of a ‘Third Space’, not hemmed
in by simple dualities, where hybridity might truly thrive.9 One
might also compare the fertile idea of the ‘Fifth Province of the
Imagination’ which has been proposed as the space in which to
think our way beyond the categorical politics rooted in the four
provinces of ancient Ireland.10 Benedict Anderson’s influential
book Imagined Communities provides an elaborated model for how
this imagination has been materialized in the very structure and
self-identity of modern societies.11 A good practical example of
these tensions in action is provided by Rushdie’s account of the
ideological struggle in Nicaragua, which he observed on a visit in
1986 and wrote about in The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
(1987).
This is much more than just a travel book. While providing,
certainly, a vivid descriptive account of the precarious situation
in Nicaragua in June 1986, when the triumphant but beleaguered Sandinistas, in government under Daniel Ortez, were
bracing themselves for the American invasion that never came,
Rushdie’s book is also a meditation on the process that goes into
the making of a nation: and on how this process may (or may
not) be compared to the ‘making’ of fiction. After the terror of
the Somoza years, including the terror of ‘nonentity’ in the
6
INTRODUCTION
Blakeian sense, when the country simply ‘wasn’t there’ (JS 157),
the liberated people of Nicaragua ‘were inventing their country,
and, more than that, themselves’. ‘At the Enrique Acuña cooperative . . . I had seen a people trying hard to construct for
themselves a new identity, a new reality, a reality that external
pressure might crush before construction work had even been
completed’ (JS 86, 96). The creative process reaches through all
levels of society: agrarian, administrative, cultural, political; but,
somehow, it is focused by the fact that so many of the politicians
are also themselves artists: poets, novelists, painters, musicians.
Rushdie is particularly struck by the proliferation of poets in
Nicaragua, and even finds himself described at one point as
‘hindú . . . poeta’ (JS 25). It may be appropriate to recall at this point
another optimistic formulation from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry:
where he says that in ‘the infancy of society every author is
necessarily a poet . . . ’.12 It is almost as if the newly born
Nicaragua is being created by its citizens as a work of art, like
Morris’s socialist Utopia or Yeats’s mythical Byzantium. And,
indeed, Rushdie does allow what Coleridge called the ‘shaping
spirit of Imagination’ to direct his own discourse. ‘It is
impossible’, he says after the 1972 earthquake and the Somoza
ravages, ‘not to see [the city of Managua] in symbolic terms’.
Meanwhile the legendary Sandino, founder of the libertarian
movement, has become ‘a cluster of metaphors’; a priest delivers
a homily which is ‘an extended metaphor’ of the political
situation, made over in biblical and other parallels (JS 17, 22).
Even the mountain range to the north of the country derives a
‘mythic, archetypal force’ from its association with the Sandinista
rebels (JS 74). Five years on from Midnight’s Children, Rushdie
reminds us at the beginning of this book that ‘I’ve always had a
weakness for synchronicity’ (JS 11), and it is not surprising that
these aspects are foregrounded in the account that follows.
But (as in that novel) the patternless retributions of the real
world are not to be avoided here. History is unlike fiction
because (he quotes from C. V. Wedgwood) it ‘is lived forward
but it is written in retrospect’. And Nicaragua likewise has to
face the future:
The act of living a real life differed, I mused, from the act of making a
fictional one, too, because you were stuck with your mistakes. No
revisions, no second drafts. To visit Nicaragua was to be shown that
7
SALMAN RUSHDIE
the world was not television, or history, or fiction. The world was
real, and this was its actual, unmediated reality. (JS 168)
This is in stark contrast to the American perception of
Nicaragua, as interpreted by an American film producer
Rushdie meets: ‘You’ve got to understand that for Americans,
Nicaragua has no reality. . . . To them it’s just another TV show.
That’s all it is.’ This meeting takes place in the Somocista country
club in Managua, where Rushdie also has a conversation with an
elderly gentleman (he ‘was, of course, a poet’) who praises the
Indian Writer Tagore – obstinately pronounced Tagoré – precisely
for his realism. Rushdie responds: ‘ ‘‘Many people think of Latin
America as the home of anti-realism,’’ I said. He looked disgusted.
‘‘Fantasy?’’ he cried. ‘‘No, sir. You must not write fantasy. It is the
worst thing. Take a tip from your great Tagoré. Realism, realism,
that is the only thing.’’ ’ (JS 56) You must not write fantasy:
realism is the only thing. The anonymous old man’s advice faces
Rushdie the novelist with his own bifurcating (or proliferating)
options; and takes us back as readers to the critical alternatives in
considering Rushdie’s art.
And here, even if it is hidden away from the front line of
conflict, there is still a war on. There are antagonists as well as
allies engaged with equal passion over the disputed territory of
the imagination, and everything that it represents, or comes to
represent, in the real world. The most bitter and dangerous
‘battle of the books’ has been (and is still being) fought over The
Satanic Verses. The ramifications and repercussions of the
infamous fatwa are not the primary concern of this study, except
in so far as this situation dramatizes issues that normally take a
more muted form in criticism. Documents gathered in The
Rushdie File (1989) remind us how central arguments over the
imagination are to this debate. Ben Okri warns that ‘we are in
danger of passing a death sentence on the imagination’; and
Carlos Fuentes underlines the double-edged importance accorded to ‘the uses of the literary imagination’: ‘By making the
imagination so dangerous that it deserves capital punishment,
the sectarians have made people everywhere wonder what it is
that literature can say that can be so powerful.’13 And in For
Rushdie, a parallel collection of articles by Arab, African, and
French writers, Edward Said says simply: ‘Rushdie is the
intifada of the imagination’, the focus of the imagination’s holy
8
INTRODUCTION
war.14 Although Rushdie has defended The Satanic Verses as a
work of fiction, seeing the charges against the novel as a
‘category mistake’, he has also admitted that the novel has been
caught up in ‘an argument about who should have power over
the grand narrative, the Story of Islam’ (IH 432); and Sardar
and Davies’s combatively entitled Distorted Imagination: Lessons
from the Rushdie Affair attacks Rushdie on precisely these
grounds.15 In what is one of the most deeply considered
contributions to the debate, A Brief History of Blasphemy, Richard
Webster reminds us that we need to exercise our own
responsibility in these matters: ‘We need to take back our
imaginative powers from the artists, novelists and poets to
whom we have delegated them. For there is a danger in
delegating imaginative powers just as there is a danger in
delegating any powers. We need our own imaginations.’16
Rushdie is, in fact, well aware of the double-edged quality of
the powers which he exercises as an author, of what happens
when ‘we first construct pictures of the world and then . . . step
inside the frames ’ (IH 378). But, while the process of
argumentation is necessary, it is also true that it will never in
itself resolve anything; and that, for a writer, in any case, ‘the
real risks . . . are taken in the work’ (IH 15), in the complex and
precarious navigation between real and fictional worlds.
Rushdie has suggested that a book is a kind of passport, that
gives us ‘permission to travel’ in the imagination (IH 276).
Pursuing this metaphor, one might indeed suggest that
Rushdie’s novels are navigations not so much through space
(though there are journeys and destinations) nor even through
time (though this is their author’s preferred dimension), but
rather through levels of reality, dimensions in a more metaphysical sense – as perceived by the shifting sands of human
consciousness.
This is not to say that the imagination itself is either innocent
or infallible. As Rushdie said of Midnight’s Children: ‘I tried to
make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is
simultaneously honourable and suspect’ (IH 10). In an excess of
fervour or from the wrong kind of commitment, it may generate
delusions as well as visions; and Rushdie is therefore prepared
to stand in as prosecutor too. In the same essay where he
proposes the imagination as the ‘key to our humanity’, he also
9
SALMAN RUSHDIE
concedes that ‘the imagination can falsify, demean, ridicule,
caricature and wound as effectively as it can clarify, intensify
and unveil’ (IH 143). He cites the notion of ‘commonwealth
literature’ itself as an instance of imaginative perversity: the
category is a ‘chimera’, a ‘monstrous creature of the imagination . . . composed of elements which could not possibly be
joined together in the real world’ (IH 63). The British general
election of 1983 was, in Rushdie’s view, ‘a dark fantasy, a fiction
so outrageously improbable that any novelist would be ridiculed
if he dreamed it up’ (IH 159). The 1986 essay ‘Debrett Goes to
Hollywood’ even betrays Rushdie’s disenchantment, on this
score, with the cinema. In the old days he says we allowed the
stars to determine our reality for us: ‘Banality made our lives
unreal; they were the ones who were fully alive. So we munched
our popcorn and grew confused about reality.’ But the situation
has now got out of hand: ‘When murderers start becoming stars,
you know something has gone badly wrong. . . . And when the
techniques of starmaking, or image and illusion, become the
staple of politics, you understand . . . ’(IH 328); you understand,
that is, that the imagination has been enlisted for corrupt or at
best for futile purposes. Recalling the critique of media images
made in Nicaragua, Rushdie quotes approvingly Michael Herr’s
castigation of the Vietnam represented on television and in film
as a dangerous phenomenon. The media, says Herr, are guilty of
deflecting the American public ‘from any true meditation about
what happened there’, and so from any ‘collective act of
understanding’. The movies have provided a substitute experience for the war, but ‘the war was not a movie. It was real’ (IH
334–5). Even Saul Bellow is accused of ‘investing his fiction with
the absolute authority of reality’, an instance of hubris in a writer;
Naipaul likewise with purveying ‘a novelist’s truth masquerading
as objective reality’ (IH 351, 374). This represents perhaps a
curious reversal of priorities; but it is also a useful reminder of the
limitations which must be placed on the freedom of the
imagination – which Rushdie is later prepared to theorize with
reference to his own case. In the 1990 essay ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’
Rushdie asks himself whether his own instinctive belief in the
‘absolute freedom of the imagination’ might not represent a
‘secular fundamentalism’ with dangers of its own, ‘as likely to
lead to excesses, abuses and oppressions as the canons of
10
INTRODUCTION
religious faith’ (IH 418). He comes back to argue that of all the art
forms ‘literature can still be the most free’, and to assert that ‘the
interior space of the imagination is a theatre that can never be
closed down’ (IH 424, 426); but at the end of the essay he
concedes that there is no privileged category: ‘The only privilege
literature deserves – and this privilege it requires in order to exist
– is the privilege of being the arena of discourse, the place where
the struggle of languages can be acted out.’ (IH 427).
It is not only in the essays but in the novels themselves that
Rushdie pursues the critique of the imagination – a theme we
shall return to in the chapters that follow. Rushdie’s first
published novel Grimus is an exploration of the function of the
imagination itself, an allegorical narrative of how the imagination can seek to detach itself from reality and create a ‘world’ of
its own, outside time and accident, but immune also to the
rhythm of creation in birth and death, and the love that
embraces them. It is Rushdie’s version of the familiar romantic
myth of a space created by the imagination as a refuge from the
responsibilities of the real world. This responsibility is fully
assumed in Midnight’s Children, where the imagination is
enlisted to participate in the birth of a nation, macroscopically,
and at the microscopic birth of one child (and his thousand
magical siblings). The story of Saleem Sinai’s first thirty years is
synchronized with the first thirty years of independent India,
with optimistic moments and dramatic reversals carefully crossstitched in the narrative. But even here we are not to believe
everything we are told. Saleem’s father Ahmed Sinai is a victim
of fantasy in his own life; his longing for ‘fictional ancestors’
leads him to ‘invent a family pedigree that . . . would obliterate
all traces of reality’, and the narrator Saleem himself confesses at
one point to telling self-protective lies: ‘I fell victim to the
temptation of every autobiographer . . . to create past events
simply by saying they occurred’ (MC 109–10, 427). The lesson to
be drawn from this is that history is not only made, by events, but
also made up, narrated, like the story of a life or the anecdotes
within it. ‘History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to
establish, and capable of being given many meanings. . . . The
reading of Saleem’s unreliable narration might be . . . a useful
analogy for the way in which we all, every day, attempt to
‘‘read’’ the world’ (IH 25). It is this creative combination that falls
11
SALMAN RUSHDIE
apart in Shame. Pakistan, we are told, is a country that has been
‘insufficiently imagined’, and Rushdie’s novel of near-Pakistan
wrestles with a series of irreconcilable polarities: the two
‘halves’ of Pakistan itself, the deadlocked Harappa/Hyder
families, and what Rushdie identifies as the competing male
and female plots. Here, it may be suggested, there is no
reconciling metaphor, no resolution back into history (where
‘art dies back to life’, in a phrase from a poem by D. J. Enright17);
there is only the coruscation of shame itself, and the dubious
promise of the novel’s apocalyptic ending.
The operations of the mind itself, in its imaginative capacity,
are brought into sharp focus again in The Satanic Verses, this time
in a novel which is also densely realized in terms of both
contemporary–historical and mythical–religious contexts. The
imaginative threads and coherences that compose identity; the
pivotal, polymorphous energies of the imagination producing
both good and evil; the degrees of imaginative assent that
constitute faith (and doubt) – all these interact in the novel,
interrogating each other through different personalities
(grouped around Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha),
different locations (Bombay, London, ‘Jahilia’), different historical periods, contrasted states of consciousness (waking/dreaming, sane/insane, ecstatic/suicidal). Caught at one moment in
these currents, Gibreel exclaims ‘if I was God, I’d cut the
imagination right out of people’ (SV 122): this is where all our
dilemmas are identified. How to live our lives imaginatively but
free of illusion? The novel elaborates on this theme in complex
counterpoint and delivers what are in effect two endings,
reflecting success or failure in this very negotiation. Haroun and
the Sea of Stories provides a lighter but no less illuminating
account of these proceedings. The imagination can be threatened by personal unhappiness and arbitrary power, but by the
same token it possesses the resources to fight back against and
overcome these tyrannies. And (to take a more optimistic view of
the tension between generations), the comic dimension of this
fairy tale for adults is endorsed by the fact that it is a son who
frees his father on the troubled sea of stories, blessing the
biological ‘narrative’ with the restoration of the gift of narrative
itself. The stories in East, West provide their own versions of this
imaginative enterprise, introducing us to multiple selves,
12
INTRODUCTION
alternative futures, instances of the problematic ‘permeation of
the real world by the fictional’ (EW 94) which ask and hesitate to
answer the familiar personal and cultural questions. In The
Moor’s Last Sigh Rushdie returns to the materials – and to some
of the methods and motifs – of Midnight’s Children, but with a
very different imaginative as well as geographical perspective.
There is once again a macro- and micro-narrative: this time, the
greater history of the Spanish/Portuguese colonizing of Goa,
and the smaller history of the Zogoiby family and firm, working
the spice trade in Cochin. But what is different here is that
Rushdie offers us a bifocal view of this twinned narrative, a
developed metaphor for the imaginative assumption of experience. First there is the story itself, narrated in the first person by
Moraes Zogoiby (‘Moor’); then there is the visual record of some
of these events, in the series of paintings made by his mother
Aurora over many years, which are described in great detail in
the text. These reflect both the history of modern India and her
own anguished family story, offering at the same time a history
and a critique of artistic representation itself – from the
transformations of myth through social documentary and
domestic drama to the imposition of a hard, ideological overlay.
So that, when a character says ‘I blame fiction’ for the problems
we bring on ourselves (MLS 351), we recall that the novels mean
to engage us in a continuous discussion of the subject. And,
although the imagination is the ‘prime mover’ in Rushdie’s
fiction, and in a sense always part of the subject itself, the novels
contain their own critique of the fiction-making process, and a
permanent reminder of our responsibility to the ‘real world’ –
however this is to be recognized. As Steven Connor has
remarked, ‘At the heart of Midnight’s Children is a curiously
moralistic mistrust of the modes of the fabulous which it
indulges with such zest’.18
Making our own navigation from the novels to a theory that
might underpin them, we note that the arts of the imagination
have to be identified and brought under discussion in formal
terms – according to relevant conventions and expectations. One
of the characters in Grimus expresses a preference for stories
which are ‘like life, slightly frayed at the edges, full of loose ends
and lives juxtaposed by accident’, over those stories which are
‘neat’, ‘tight’, and governed by ‘some grand design’ (G. 141). The
13
SALMAN RUSHDIE
alternatives set out here provide a useful grounding for the
formal discussion of Rushdie’s work – not least, because they
expose what looks like a contradiction.
On the one hand, there is the familiar breaking down of
formal categories, the endorsement of multiformity: the author
proposes that the form of Midnight’s Children, ‘multitudinous,
hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country’, should be
understood as ‘the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s
personal tragedy’ (IH 16). Likewise, if Saleem’s own vision is
fragmentary, a ‘broken mirror’, nevertheless ‘the broken mirror
may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly
unflawed’ (IH 10). He suggests (in this same essay) that it is the
mode of fantasy, ‘or the mingling of fantasy and realism’, that
can best represent Indian reality, providing the necessary
‘double perspective’: ‘this stereoscopic vision is perhaps what
we can offer in the place of ‘‘whole sight’’ ’ (IH 19) – the ‘whole
sight’ which is disowned as the delusive promise of omniscient
Western realism. It is significant that Rushdie’s defence of The
Satanic Verses is also made primarily in formal rather than
ideological terms. The novel – at least in the view of its author –
‘celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation
that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human
beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs’; it is (he says) ‘a
love-song to our mongrel selves’ (IH 394). This becomes in a later
essay (‘Is Nothing Sacred?’) a defence of the novel itself: ‘the most
freakish, hybrid and metamorphic of forms’, which was ‘created
to discuss the fragmentation of truth’, a form which realizes its
true potential in ‘challenging absolutes of all kinds’ (IH 422–5).
One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence, and the advocacy by another
exiled and beleaguered writer of a form which he valued
precisely for its being ‘incapable of the absolute’.19
But our experience as readers of Rushdie’s fiction insists that
there is another principle at work within this centrifugal
fragmentation. There is also a centripetal counter-movement
which seeks to bring all these miscellaneous fragments into
significant relation with each other. The obtrusive coincidences,
synchronicities, the anticipations and recapitulations, all those
elements which even the battered Saleem sees as part of the
‘national desire for form’, are the work of an organizing
intelligence, and are as essential to the arts of the imagination
14
INTRODUCTION
as any other quality. Receptiveness and responsiveness, curiosity,
have to be balanced, activated, by desire and design; as Coleridge
reminds us, the imagination coordinates and subordinates as part
of its task of invoking and celebrating.20 Rushdie’s own valuation
of the ‘centripetal’ principle is clear not only from his own
practice but also from comments made about other novelists. His
debt to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is as significant as it is well
documented,21 because Sterne’s objective in that novel is to mask
order (art) with disorder (life), to be as he says ‘digressive,
and . . . progressive too, – and at the same time’,22 in effect
reconciling two contrary principles. Rushdie’s own version has it:
‘to write in a form which appears to be formless’ (IH 179).
Rushdie has confessed to being ‘very keen on the eighteenth
century in general, not just in literature’, and his comment on
another eighteenth-century masterpiece, Fielding’s Tom Jones,
provides a useful sight into the writerly qualities he most admires:
the thing that’s very impressive about Tom Jones is the plot, you
have this enormous edifice which seems to be so freewheeling,
rambling – and actually everything is there for a purpose. It’s the
most extraordinary piece of organization which at the same time
seems quite relaxed and not straitjacketed by its plot. I think that’s
why the book is so wonderful.23
Rushdie makes another instructive parallel between his own
novelistic practice and that of Fielding and Sterne in a later
interview when he observes, ‘I spend much more time on the
architecture of my books than on their writing. It takes me a
very, very long time to understand the book . . .what connects
with what and what the machine is. That’s why it takes me five
or six years to write one of those big books.‘24
One has to conclude that the formal principles at work in
Rushdie’s fiction are more complex than might at first be
supposed. Not only is there the endorsement of hybridity (the
mixture of Western and Eastern forms, of written and oral
modes; the mixture of ‘fantasy and naturalism’; the mixture of
genres and styles, of media and languages – all associating in an
aleatory, linear time), but also the simultaneous appeal to order;
to the structure of coincidence, to pattern, control; to the
symmetry of biology, the purity of mathematical logic or
geometric design – these having their fulfilment in the
15
SALMAN RUSHDIE
complementary idea of time as cyclic and recurrent. This
opposition, with its ethical and political as well as aesthetic
coordinates, lies at the very heart of Rushdie’s fiction, to be
revolved in different ways in each of the novels. And it is also a
theme that helps conduct the critical debate.
CRITICAL RESPONSES
Provocativeness is not without its perils, and it will surprise no
one that the critical response to Rushdie’s work includes all
shades of opinion, delivered from a wide variety of viewpoints.
Even if we set aside (as I shall do) the merely expletive attacks
from those who have never actually read the work, there is still a
body of informed opinion that takes objection to Rushdie’s work
on general, ideological grounds; and it might be useful to
consider the nature of these objections before proceeding
further. This will involve returning to Rushdie’s claims for the
imagination, which are contested by those who argue that the
individual imagination is conditioned by other, underlying
factors that need to be entered in the cultural equation before
this faculty is allowed ‘free play’. In what was the first important
book on Rushdie, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the
Nation (1989), Timothy Brennan develops a critique of the kind of
imaginative investment made (or not made) by Rushdie, Vargas
Llosa, and other ‘cosmopolitan writers of the Third World’ whose
attitude to the national myth exhibits what he calls a ‘creative
duplicity’.25 With them, argues Brennan, the familiar figures of
‘allusion, metaphor, allegorical parable are all like nationalism
itself, ‘‘janus-faced’’ ’, with one face looking west. He quotes
Gabriel Marquez’s definition of the imagination against both
Marquez himself and Rushdie: if Marquez believes that ‘the
imagination is nothing more than an instrument for elaborating
reality’, then it should be used more responsibly. ‘Their
shockingly inappropriate juxtaposition of humorous matter-offactness and appallingly accurate violence, both ironically alludes
to the blasé reporting of contemporary news and the preventable
horrors of current events.’26 Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children may, he
says, have put ‘the Indo-English imagination on the map’, but
only through being parasitic on earlier developments. Writing of
16
INTRODUCTION
the Pakistan we meet in Shame, Brennan accuses Rushdie of
destroying ‘any coherence his imagination may have given the
country by adopting a formal attitude that makes every statement
capable of being at the same time withdrawn’,27 a revealing
criticism (picking up the ‘janus’ image) which disallows – or
simply fails to understand – the inherent duplicity of the
imagination, as defined by Swift, developed by Sterne, and
inherited by Rushdie from this and other traditions of storytelling. As Milan Kundera has argued, in fiction ‘the unique truth
is powerless’, since the ‘satanic ambiguity’ which is the novel’s
privilege ‘turns every certainty into enigma’.28 It is significant that
Brennan also objects to Rushdie’s irony, endorsing Gramsci’s
preference for ‘impassioned sarcasm’ as ‘the appropriate stylistic
element for historical-political action’.29 Aijaz Ahmad certainly
seems to have schooled himself on sarcasm for his follow-up
attack on Rushdie in In Theory (1992). The chapter on Shame in
this book is a systematic attempt to disqualify Rushdie’s writing
through a closely argued but nevertheless tendentious analysis
of his imaginative formation. ‘How very enchanting’, he reflects,
‘Rushdie’s kind of imagination must be’ for readers brought up
on a certain kind of modernist universalism. ‘One did not have
to belong, one could simply float, effortlessly, through a
supermarket of packaged and commodified cultures, ready to
be consumed’.30 Ahmad challenges what he calls the ‘grid of
predispositions which have gone into the making of such an
imagination’, on the way to rejecting ‘the whole imaginative
topography of modernism’.31 Ahmad’s own ‘predispositions’
are clearly otherwise, as is revealed in this summary of the
situation in the attending novel, Shame:
For so wedded is Rushdie’s imagination to imageries of wholesale
degradation and unrelieved social wreckage, so little is he able to
conceive of a real possibility of regenerative projects on the part of
those who actually exist within our contemporary social reality, that
even when he attempts, towards the end of the novel, to open up a
regenerative possibility, in the form of Sufiya’s flight . . . the powers
which he, as author, bestows upon her in the moment of her
triumph are powers only of destruction.
Ahmad too is wrongfooted by Rushdie’s ambivalence, protesting
at the ‘linguistic quicksand’ in this novel, ‘as if the truth of each
utterance were conditioned by the existence of its opposite’32 – a
17
SALMAN RUSHDIE
valuable insight, were it not offered ironically. (As Oscar Wilde
reminded us, ‘a Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also
true’.)33
The work of Brennan and Ahmad may be taken as sufficiently
representative of the denigration of Rushdie’s work by certain
‘post-colonial’ critics – those who would tie in the novel form
deterministically to Western ideological formations, and read
individual novels for signs of their authors’ ignorance, fallibility,
or opportunism. Brennan challenges not only the critical
reception but the very authenticity of writers such as Rushdie,
Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Isabelle Allende, and what he
reads as their implicit claim to ‘represent’ Third World realities.
Drawing on Gramsci’s analysis of the unaffiliated intellectual in
Italy in the 1930s, who becomes ‘cosmopolitan’ because of the
political fragmentation of that country, and also the adoption of
the term by Frantz Fanon to describe the parasitic middle class
in emergent African states, Brennan develops his own notion of
the ‘Third World cosmopolitan’ as someone (whether politician,
writer, or global industrialist) whose cultural allegiance is to a
First World order, severed from any national, collective, or
democratic reference. As a result, these values will tend to
appear only in parodic or otherwise distorted forms. Rushdie
has been selected by this critic as an example of a cultural and
political argument of his own, and his criticism is heavily
conditioned by a set of beliefs which perceive literature as
‘politicized in the prescriptive sense’, and functioning as ‘a
social institution with interventionary powers’.34 Ahmad meanwhile blames Rushdie’s descent from modernism for his ‘bleak
vision’, his ‘aesthetic of despair ’. The ‘highly pressuring
perspective of modernism’, he suggests, ‘uses the condition of
exile as the basic metaphor for modernity and even for the
human condition itself’, preventing any real engagement with
history. Reading Shame, he objects, ‘one is in danger of forgetting
that Bhutto and Zia were in reality no buffoons, but highly
capable and calculating men whose cruelties were entirely
methodical’.35 This puts one in mind of the blank objections
raised against storytelling by Mr Sengupta in Haroun and the Sea
of Stories: ‘What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’ (HSS
20). Mr Sengupta would have been ill-advised to become a
literary critic. Taking up a similar post-colonial perspective in an
18
INTRODUCTION
essay called ‘From Politics to Poetics’, Tim Parnell likewise
criticizes the way Rushdie’s novels operate on the ‘boundaries
between the fictional and the historical ’. For him, the novels’
complexity reflects the ‘labyrinth cunningly constructed by an
imperial past’, and thereby ‘does appear to deny the peoples of
India and Pakistan the possibility of escaping’ from it. Somehow
it becomes the fault of fiction that, for all its imaginative
exploration, ‘the established structures of power remain undisturbed’. And so Parnell concludes that the ‘waning of Saleem’s
magic powers’ in Midnight’s Children ‘might be read as a
metaphor for the political limitations of Rushdie’s attempts to
harness postmodern poetics to a postcolonial political agenda’.36
It is worth recalling at this point James Harrison’s very
reasonable question: ‘upon what compulsion . . . must Rushdie
meet the criteria for salvation specified by some post-colonial
catechism?’37 One is surely entitled to suspect criticism that fails
to see what is actually there in a writer’s work, and compounds
that failure by lamenting the absence of something derived from
its own prescription. Keith Wilson is a more reliable guide when
he suggests that ‘what Rushdie presumes in his reader, and
what he makes the base of his narrative strategy, is an ability to
read a text as literature, with an instinctive understanding of the
nature of the process that is under way’.38 It is only when we can
read literature disinterestedly, with an awareness of this process,
that we can safely negotiate between it and other discourses.
Malise Ruthven provides the model for such a negotiation in the
chapter ‘Satanic Fictions’ in his A Satanic Affair (1990). Ruthven
begins from the position that, though Rushdie, while being a
novelist, is also both journalist and activist, his fictional critique
‘contains an ambivalence’ that sets it apart, makes it something
qualitatively different from the social intervention. It is the
nature of novelistic discourse that ‘form rather than content
becomes the vehicle of dissent’.39 He quotes a review by Brad
Leithauser from the New Yorker, which argued that The Satanic
Verses ‘is so dense a layering of dreams and hallucinations that
any attempt to extract an unalloyed line of argument is false to is
intention’. He also cites Gayatri Spivak’s view that there is ‘no
clear boundary between religion and fiction as products of the
imagination’ in the novel, on the way to arguing on his own
account that the novel should be seen as ‘a kind of ‘‘anti-
19
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Qur’an’’ which challenges the original by substituting for the
latter’s absolutist certainties a theology of doubt.’40
And this takes us into the formal heart of the ideological
argument. ‘For the novel as a genre has an ideology – it is an
ideology – of its own, one that lives by attacking the tendency of
ideology itself to abandon ‘‘the wisdom of uncertainty’’ in the
pursuit of a totalizing system.’ Thus Michael Gorra in After
Empire.41 And, although this implies potential conflict with a
whole range of ideologies, it is inevitably the dramatic conflict
with militant Islam that has occasioned most commentary. One
may cite Milan Kundera again: ‘theocracy goes to war against
the Modern Era and targets its most representative creation: the
novel’.42 The fundamentalist response to what Brennan calls the
‘provocation’ to Islam is documented in The Rushdie File, and
developed in the extensive literature on the ‘Rushdie Affair’.43
But, if one is trying to defend a space for fiction, not just in
theory but in conflictual praxis, one must acknowledge the
intervention of those Islamic scholars who have themselves
spoken up in Rushdie’s defence. First published in French (with
many articles translated from Arabic) in 1993, the volume For
Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech
is an impressive collection of nearly a hundred articles written
from what the editors refer to as ‘the currently devastated city
that is Islam today’ towards that fictional place where ‘the
prophetic gesture has been opened up to the four winds of the
imaginary’.44 It is from a similar perspective that Sadik Al-Azm
defends Rushdie against the ‘archaism’ of Islam, linking him to a
long tradition of writers and film-makers (from Rabelais to
Scorsese) whose work represents a necessary challenge to
repressive authority both religious and secular.45 And in the
course of an excellent, clarifying article on the issues surrounding The Satanic Verses, which relocates these in the discourse of
satire itself, Srinivas Aravamudan asks the pertinent question:
must there not be ‘a polytheistic blasphemy lurking under every
resolute monotheism?’ It is significant that Aravamudan cites
the authorial duplicities of Swift here, and the model of the
anarchic imagination we have already referred to, in A Tale of a
Tub.46 The satirist is never innocent; but we must ask ourselves,
of what exactly is he guilty? It is strange – almost perverse, in
this context – that Stephanie Newell should suggest in her article
20
INTRODUCTION
‘The Other God: Salman Rushdie’s ‘‘New’’ Aesthetic’, that
Rushdie sets up in The Satanic Verses a text which is to be read as
a dogmatic alternative to the Koran itself; that Rushdie’s ‘allcontrolling creative Ego’, functioning as ‘arbiter of reality’,
imposes a ‘quasi-theological new Truth’ upon the reader. This
essay, often cited, is a good example of how a perverse reading
can turn the text against itself, making a ‘prison’ (the term is
actually used in the argument) of what is offered as an
imaginative adventure.47
A second ideological construction that we need to consider is
that of gender politics. The subject of gender represents, as we
know, one of the most sensitive critical issues of our time, and it
has to be said that Rushdie’s work has sustained a good deal of
adverse response in this connection. The narrator of Shame tells
us that the ambiguous hero Omar Khayyam ‘developed
pronounced misogynistic tendencies at an early age’ (S. 40),
and it has become almost a critical reflex to pass on the charge to
Rushdie himself (relating this, often, to the Islamic culture
which provided him with his own formative experience).
Catherine Cundy, in her otherwise even-handed treatment of
Rushdie, is consistently critical of this aspect of his work. His
‘tendency to demonize female sexuality’, his ‘ambivalence if not
outright confusion’, are, she says, declared in Grimus, repeated
in Midnight’s Children (where she defends even Indira Gandhi
against presentation ‘in such relentlessly misogynist terms’),
and confirmed in Shame, where the ‘blend of confusion,
frustration, and even outright hostility’ to women is ‘more
evident . . . than anywhere else’.48 Which does not, however,
spare the later novels. Cundy rests her case with the proposition
that the treatment of women in Rushdie’s novels ‘serves more as
a revelation (albeit involuntary) of Rushdie’s psychology’ than it
contributes to the fiction.49 The shallower side of this argument
is exemplified by Inderpal Grewal, who decides for herself that
‘what Rushdie writes for’ is ‘the improvement in the lot of
Pakistani women’, and then accuses him of failing to deliver. It is
characteristic of such criticism that she goes on to prescribe the
novel Rushdie should have written: ‘If Rushdie had drawn upon
a history of struggle instead of a history of subjection, his novel
could have provided a myth of struggle and liberation that
would have helped present and future struggles’.50 Anuradha
21
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Dingwaney Needham, on the other hand, is prepared to look
beyond the declared and dramatized positions of Rushdie and
his characters to the field of discourse within which these occur:
‘We do not . . . find a unitary, monolithic identity in Rushdie;
rather, his work reflects a conception of post-colonial identity
that is fluid, multiple, shifting, and responsive to varied
situations and varied audiences.’ For her, Rushdie does not
create an ’utopian or visionary space’ for women; he seeks
rather ‘to expose the particular and horrifying conditions of their
oppression’. Needham concludes her essay with an account of
her experience as reader and teacher of Rushdie’s fiction. This
has revealed that ‘Rushdie’s construction of post-colonial
identities . . . is particularly enabling’, and his two novels Midnight’s Children and Shame ‘have turned out to be wonderful
texts with which to begin and end a course on ‘‘Third World’’
literature in English’.51
It should be easier to characterize the response to Rushdie’s
fiction from a formal point of view, if only by default, in that
even the adverse ideological criticism concedes the formal
originality of his work. And there is indeed a consensus that, if
Rushdie has ‘put the Indo-English imagination on the map’, it is
substantially due to his mastery of the eclectic modes of fiction.
But the very fact of Rushdie’s eclecticism has actually made it
difficult for critics to interpret Rushdie’s formal project. In the
introduction to his substantial collection of essays Reading
Rushdie, M. D. Fletcher sets up a battery of formal terms,
hesitating in his attribution between different categories as well
as forms and styles: the postmodern and the post-colonial,
metafictional strategies of various kinds (including parody), oral
tradition and magic realism, forms of satire, polyphony,
metamorphosis, and the grotesque.52 And the essays themselves
do not provide a more coherent picture. Grimus defeats critical
ingenuity, Ib Johansen proposing it is ‘a strange blend of
mythical or allegorical narrative, fantasy, science fiction, and
Menippean satire’, while Catherine Cundy settles here for the
formula ‘chaotic fantasy’.53 Peter Brigg sees Midnight’s Children as
a ‘mixture of comedy, grotesque, and intellectual puzzle’,54 while
The Satanic Verses is variously described as comic burlesque, an
intermingling of fabulism and surrealism, encyclopaedic, carnivalesque, an example of ‘enantiomorphism’ (that is, characterized
22
INTRODUCTION
by oppositional structure), a ‘Wo/manichaean novel’, a Manichaean allegory, the apotheosis of gossip (‘an underrated
medium’), an epiphanic tragedy, and the first postmodern Islamic
novel.55 For all the ingenuity sometimes displayed in these formal
identifications, there is little critical insight or real orientation
offered to the reader. The more illuminating descriptions are
provided by those critics who are less concerned to label the
novels (like Saleem’s pickle jars) but remain alert to their
distinctive flavours, however these may be communicated.
Sometimes this will be by impressionistic comparison, as when
Uma Parameswaran compares the structure of Grimus to a Rubik
cube, or when Keith Wilson finds the technique of ‘literary
pointillism’ in Midnight’s Children; with Patricia Merivale’s ‘comic
zeugmas’ and ‘grotesque shifts of perspective’ in the same
novel;56 with those critics elsewhere who have noted Rushdie’s
characteristic use of repetition, recapitulation, and prolepsis, as
well as the distinctive palinode;57 and those who have drawn
attention to his debt to the art of cinema.58
Academic criticism has found Rushdie’s fiction fertile ground
for the study of influences and intertextual reference – much of
it interesting and informative within the limited terms accepted
by such an exercise. Rushdie’s declared debts to Cervantes,
Sterne, Joyce, Grass, and Marquez have been extensively (if not
exhaustively) explored. However, the less obvious but no less
pervasive influence of other writers deserves further study. One
thinks not only of Shakespeare, and the exemplary eighteenthcentury writers (other than Sterne) – that is to say, Defoe, Swift,
and Fielding; but also of Blake and Dickens; Kafka and
Bulgakov; Yeats, Beckett, and Ted Hughes: from all of these
Rushdie has derived perspectives that are deeply set at thematic
and even structural levels, as well as traceable verbally in the
work. There has so far been no specific or extended treatment of
Rushdie’s interplay with any of these authors, which would
certainly add to our appreciation and understanding. Meanwhile, it is that criticism that has been able to relate Rushdie’s
work to its Eastern as well as its Western sources which has
proved a useful corrective to the kinds of cultural appropriation
occasionally described above. Uma Parameswaran’s 1988 collection of her own essays, The Perforated Sheet, is one valuable
contribution here; as are the two pieces on Rushdie in Sara
23
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992). Both these authors
feature in Fletcher’s collection, alongside others (Aravamudan,
Bharucha, Sadik Al-Azm) who represent Indian and Arabic
traditions. The Novels of Salman Rushdie (edited by G. R. Taneja
and Rajinder Kuman Dhawan, New Delhi, 1992) contains two
dozen essays by mainly Indian critics, reprinted from two issues
of the Commonwealth Review in 1990. One should also draw
attention to articles which have appeared since 1980 in journals
such as ARIEL, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal
of Indian Writing in English, Kunapipi, Wasafiri, World Literature
Today, and World Literature Written in English.
LANGUAGE
All these critical explorations have to do in some measure with
the recognition of Salman Rushdie’s originality as a writer,
whether this is defined in formal terms or according to Ashis
Nandy’s deep-field formula – the ‘reinterpretation of tradition
to create new traditions’.59 But we cannot consider the nature of
Rushdie’s originality without finally making some reference to
language itself, the writer ’s immediate and conditioning
medium. The question proposed in The Satanic Verses – ‘How
does newness enter the world?’ – presents itself first of all in
linguistic terms. From Grimus onwards, Rushdie was in the
business of inventing not just worlds but languages; the
languages of groups, trades, professions, cliques, as well as the
distinctive Dickensian idiolects of individuals. And language
also makes itself available as metaphor for the creative process,
when the midnight child is in the womb: ‘What had been (at the
beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a
comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was
bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one
might say, a book – perhaps an encyclopaedia – even a whole
language . . .’(MC 100). According to Rushdie, it is the migrant
writer who is best placed to act as midwife as language itself is
new-delivered; the migrant who has experienced the double
loss of being ‘out-of-country and out-of-language’ and ‘enters
into an alien language’ where he is ‘obliged to find new ways of
describing himself, new ways of being human’ (IH 12, 278).
24
INTRODUCTION
Intriguingly, Rushdie proposes Joyce as the honourable
antecedent to this tradition;60 one could perhaps add Conrad,
before passing on to the familiar roll-call of ‘writers from
elsewhere’ who have remade English for their own purposes.
‘To conquer English may be to complete the process of making
ourselves free’ (IH 17). And English, as it happens, has proved
easily accessible. In the essay ‘Commonwealth Literature’
Rushdie argues that if ‘those peoples who were once colonized
by the language are now rapidly remaking it’, this is partly due
to ‘the English language’s enormous flexibility and size’, which
allow newcomers to reverse the colonial process by ‘carving out
large territories for themselves within its frontiers’ (IH 64). The
‘territory’ of language shares a dimension here with the
contested space of the imagination. This idea is repeated in
the formulation whereby books provide us with ‘new and better
maps of reality’, ‘new descriptions of the world, new maps for
old’ (IH 100, 202). And, if English is the world language, we
should be prepared to forgo academic (or political) categorizations and recognize the novel as its world literature. ‘I think that
if all English literatures could be studied together, a shape would
emerge which would truly reflect the new shape of the language
in the world’ (IH 70).
But it is not simply a matter of the English language. Rushdie
celebrates what he calls the ‘polyglot family tree’ of the novel,
citing Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, and Machado de Assis
(IH 21); and his references to Grass, Llosa, Fuentes, and Kundera
remind us that it is the novel’s engagement with language as
such, mingling discourse within and between cultures, that is its
distinguishing feature – both rhetorically and ideologically.
Rushdie quotes Fuentes: ‘Impose a unitary language: you kill
the novel’; and in his own person he insists that the novels he
values are those ‘which attempt radical reformulations of
language, form and ideas’ – fulfilling the novel ’s brief ‘to see
the world anew’ (IH 420, 393). All this is consistent with his own
purpose, which has been ‘to create a literary language and
literary forms in which the experience of formerly colonized,
still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression’ (IH 394).
Rushdie’s own criticism of other writers is very alert to their
qualities of language,61 and in the case of G. V. Desani (with his
1947 novel All About H. Hatterr) he acknowledges a direct
25
SALMAN RUSHDIE
influence. Desani’s ‘dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first
genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English
language’ – not surprising, then, the admission that ‘my own
writing . . . learned a trick or two from him’.62 It seems appropriate,
therefore, that there are critics who have devoted their attention
to this aspect of his work. Rustom Bharucha’s essay ‘Rushdie’s
Whale’ offers an enthusiastic commentary on Rushdie’s linguistic
energy and inventiveness, the way he has ‘bastardized . . .
hybridized . . . and cinematized’ the English language for his
own special purposes; to stock the ‘gargantuan storehouse of
words’ that is Midnight’s Children, to work the subtly embroidered
lexis for Rani Harappa’s shawls in Shame. It is Bharucha’s close
focus on Rushdie’s language that allows him to claim that ‘there is
a stronger emphasis [in Shame] on the elemental than on the
political, the inexplicable rather than the rational’, and to identify
the imaginative world-swallowing required of the reader by
Saleem Sinai as essentially a verbal exercise. ‘Rarely in literature
has a writer displayed a greater hunger for words, an almost
frightening openness to the history of his universe’.63 Jacqueline
Bardolph’s ‘Language is Courage’ likewise proposes that ‘the
courage to conceive certain thoughts, the courage of the
imagination’ is inherently a linguistic phenomenon.64 One may
take a useful critical cue (again) from James Harrison here, when
he remarks that ‘almost everything one can say about Rushdie’s
novels is exemplified in his prose style’.65 It is to this linguistic
phenomenon, this prose style, as well as to the exciting ideas and
structures that they mediate, that the present study of Rushdie is
addressed. And, after these necessary preliminaries, we may now
return to Rushdie’s own ‘preliminary’ novel, Grimus, which
(reviewed as it was alongside David Lodge’s Changing Places) set
such a puzzle for his first unsuspecting readers.
26
2
Grimus
Rushdie’s first attempt at fiction was a novel on Indian themes
(called ‘The Book of the Pir’), which remains unpublished;
though some of the abandoned material may have found its way
later into Midnight’s Children.1 Grimus represents a radically
different departure. It was conceived as a contender for the
Science Fiction Prize offered annually by Victor Gollancz, who
published the novel; but it is hardly surprising that it was not
selected as a specially successful example of the genre. Although
it does have the authentic intellectual excitement associated
with such fiction, and is constructed with great ingenuity, there
are too many other things going on, too many other interests
being served, for it to have the distinctive science-fiction polish.
As we have already noted, the transgression of genre categories
has remained a consistent feature of Rushdie’s fiction, and this is
due both to the eclectic traditions from which he has drawn and
the desire – traceable to the novel’s origins – to make something
new in the world. Like his admired Fielding, Rushdie thinks of
the novel (still) as a ‘new province of writing’,2 and we will
better understand his experimentation, the rules broken, the
risks taken, and the demands made on the reader, if we share a
sense of the urgency with which he persuades the novel to
‘forge . . . the uncreated conscience’ of the reader, as Joyce had
proposed to do in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – one of
the modern novels to which Rushdie most frequently alludes.3
Grimus is a novel about knowledge and power; about mortality
and immortality; about static forms and metamorphic engines;
above all, it is about the use and abuse of the human
imagination. As such it engages immediately with Rushdie’s
major themes, perhaps prematurely and therefore in a way that
cannot yet do them justice: but it has nevertheless the virtues of
27
SALMAN RUSHDIE
a young writer’s confidence, daring, and uninhibited experimentation. The narrative that carries the theme echoes one of
the primal fictions: the arrival of a lone man on an island, his
perilous adventures among its inhabitants, his moral crisis and
apotheosis. It also follows one of the elementary structural
patterns, divided as it is into three parts (like Dickens’s Hard
Times and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; and, incidentally,
Rushdie’s own Midnight’s Children): Times Past, Times Present,
and Grimus. But the individual in question is no industrious
Robinson Crusoe, constructing an identity as he works at his
survival. Rushdie’s first hero ‘Flapping Eagle’ is a fictional
confection for our own postmodern times, a walking paradox – a
white American Indian of ambivalent sexual status who has
drunk an elixir of life condemning him to immortality, and who
finds his way to Calf Island, somewhere in what was once the
Mediterranean, in consequence of a futile suicide attempt. He
has simply ‘fallen through a hole in the sea’ (G. 14) to this other
half-place. We are told about Flapping Eagle’s previous history
in a twenty-page flashback (chapters 2–7), which details his
intense relationship with a sister ‘Bird-Dog’ and their mutual
enslavement to the magician Mr Sispy, who gives them two
elixirs: ‘yellow for the sun and brightness and life and blue for
infinity and calm and release when I want it. Life in a yellow
bottle, death blue as the sky.’ Bird-Dog drinks the yellow bottle
and smashes the blue one: ‘Death to death.’ Flapping Eagle
drinks the one and keeps the other (G. 20–4). He becomes the
lover of Livia Cramm, who tells him ‘where you walk, walks
Death’ (G. 27); the contents of the blue bottle are his strength,
his secret. At her death (or murder, in the complexities of the
plot: they will meet again on Calf island), Flapping Eagle sets off
on a symbolic voyage in her yacht – and in italics, as if to
underline the elementary, pre-personal nature of his journey.
He was Chameleon, changeling, all things to all men and nothing to any
man. He had become his enemies and eaten his friends. He was all of them
and none of them.
He was the eagle, prince of birds; and he was also the albatross. She clung
round his neck and died, and the mariner became the albatross . . . these were
the paradoxes that swallowed him.
A man rehearsing voices on a cliff top. . . I am looking for a suitable voice to
speak in.
28
GRIMUS
And after a while, he realized he had learnt nothing at all. The many,
many experiences, the multitude of people and the myriad crimes had left
him empty; a grin without a face. . . . He lived the same physiological day over
and over again. (G. 31–3)
This is clearly to be read as a kind of proto-fiction. The impacted
literary references (to Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
and Hughes’s Crow as well as to Rushdie’s main bird-inspiration,
Farid-ud-din ’Attar’s The Conference of the Birds) along with the
prodigality of unrealized incident prevent any real engagement
in the narrative. But then Rushdie’s technique is typically more
demonstrative than affective. Flapping Eagle is being invested
here as the first of Rushdie’s mental travellers, his voyagers
through remote regions of the mind, navigators of the
destructive element; and the process if not the personality does
therefore command our interest. This is the mode of epic rather
than of psychological fiction, to which we will become attuned
as we read further in Rushdie’s work.
Flapping Eagle has lost the death-dealing blue bottle as
Sinbad might have done, ’down a monster’s throat’; and hence the
failed suicide attempt that delivers him up on the island. Calf
Island, as we might expect, is no ordinary desert island either. It
is a high-tech, sci-fi time zone which has more in common with
Swift’s Flying Island of Laputa or Blake’s Island in the Moon – or
any such fantastic mental structure – than with the painstaking
reality of Crusoe’s island with its fragile pots and precariously
harvested corn. It is associated with purgatory, the medieval
escape hatch from heaven and hell, via a system of references to
Dante; more specifically, it has something of the Catholic
theologians’ consolation prize of limbo, that sterile heaven for
unbaptized souls. It also has curious affinities with the mysterious
mountain in Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
released the same year Grimus was published. Book and film
share the same seventies taste for high-tech mysticism, and the
kind of synthetic mythology that had been popularized by
Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game and other ‘anthropological’
novels around this time.
The novel does, therefore, as Brennan complains, ‘lack a
habitus’,4 but whether this entails failure as a fiction is another
matter. It presents us deliberately with a country of the mind,
the collective fiction of those who have betrayed their full and
29
SALMAN RUSHDIE
frail humanity, an ‘island of immortals who had found their
longevity too burdensome in the outside world, yet had been
unwilling to give it up’ (G. 41). Fittingly, the centre of its power,
and the symbol of its petrification, is the Stone Rose, conceived
and created by the bird-man Grimus, Flapping Eagle’s ultimate
antagonist, whose name is an anagram of Simurg, the creatorbird from the Persian Book of Kings. Grimus himself, whom we
meet only in Part Three, is part bird-man, part Prospero, part
Pozzo/Hamm: first of those composite figures of questionable
authority that Rushdie has refashioned from a ‘tradition’ (if it
can even be called that) beginning with the oral epics and
coming down to Kafka and Beckett.
But we are to meet Grimus only later. Flapping Eagle is
introduced to the island by Virgil Jones, a decayed Beckettian
migrant with his rocking chair and bicycle, who ironically
administers the ‘kiss of life’ to the would-have-been suicide,
recognizing in him (and revealing in himself) not so much a
person as a series of literary allusions. It is Virgil Jones who
gives Flapping Eagle his first lesson in plural realities, the terms
of which will immediately catch the attention of readers of
Rushdie’s later work.
Is it not a conceptual possibility that here, in our midst, permeating
all of us and all that surrounds us, is a completely other world. . .? In
a word, another dimension . . . . If you concede that conceptual
possibility . . . you must also concede that there may well be more
than one. In fact, that an infinity of dimensions might exist, as
palimpsests, upon and within and around our own . . .’ (G. 52–3)
Even Flapping Eagle protests here that he does not see the
relevance of Jones’s ideas to his search for his sister (which is
how he himself understands his quest at this stage), anticipating
the impatience of certain readers with what will appear to
others as one of Rushdie’s more engaging habits as a writer – his
willingness to be distracted from the narrative by any stray idea
that seems to offer discursive possibilities. Virgil Jones persists,
introducing him to the Spiral Dancers, who had ‘elevated a
branch of physics until it became a high symbolist religion’, and
found at the heart of matter ‘the pure, beautiful dance of life’ –
which may possibly be the first celebration in fiction of the
structure of DNA (G. 75). It is Virgil Jones who has gone as far as
30
GRIMUS
possible, through his discipleship of Grimus himself, in creating
by imaginative synthesis a viable, hospitable reality: ‘With
sufficient imagination, Virgil Jones had found, one could create
worlds, physical, external worlds, neither aspects of oneself nor
a palimpsest-universe. Fictions where a man could live. In those
days, Mr Jones had been a highly imaginative man’ (G. 75). It is
Virgil Jones, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, who leads
Flapping Eagle to the city of K, and to the eventual crisis of his
conflict with Grimus in Part Three.
Like any mythical contender facing ‘his own particular set of
monsters’ (G. 84), Flapping Eagle has to prove himself by
surviving other encounters first. He has already destroyed
Khallit and Mallit (G. 77–9), two paralysing ‘extrapolations of
himself ’ who seem with their coin-tossing ritual to have
migrated from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead; he has destroyed an alter-ego constructed of his own selfdoubt, and been offered ironic advice by Jones: ‘You really must
do something about your imagination, you know. It’s so awfully
lurid’ (G. 88–9). Now, like Homer’s Odysseus, or Bunyan’s
Christian, he must survive the temptations and distractions of
the road. He must meet those who have come voluntarily, if for
their different reasons to Calf Island, to follow the ‘Way of K’:
where they ‘like to think of [themselves] as complete’ (G. 123),
beyond change, beyond question. There is the beautiful Elfrida
Gribb, who when suffering insomnia will ‘ride through K on a
small velvet donkey’ (G. 108), locked in improbable love of her
gnomelike husband Ignatius Quasimodo Gribb, one-time university professor and now author of The All-Purpose Quotable
Philosophy. The moment Flapping Eagle meets her synchronizes
with a ‘blink’, a malfunction in the intellectual system that keeps
the island in being – as theologians propose that our universe
depends, second by second, on God’s continuous creative
vigilance. The nature of the ‘blink’ has all the neatness of one
of the technical ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut to make his
fictions work, and Rushdie handles it very cleverly – just as he
juggles expertly with the different dimensions, his plural worlds
themselves. He meets the ‘drinking community of K’ in O’Toole’s
bar, the Elbaroom. There is Flann Napoleon O’Toole himself (‘An
Irish Napoleon was a concept so grotesque it had to end up like
O’Toole’ (G. 111) ), who lives in a ‘haze of obscenity and vomit’,
31
SALMAN RUSHDIE
revelling in threats of violence, ‘a masturbation of power’ (G. 123).
And there are his two most regular customers, One-Track
Peckenpaw and Anthony StClair Peregritte-Hunte, otherwise
known as The Two-Time Kid. He meets Madame Jocasta, and the
distinctive girls who work in her brothel The Rising Son (sic); and
‘the most beautiful man in the world’, Gilles Priape. The
description (and the punning name) make us observe that,
among other things, Grimus familiarizes us with a regular feature
of Rushdie’s style, his addiction to what we might call the
‘narrative superlative’, the gratuitous hyperbole, a feature which
consciously looks across to folk tale, fairy tale (and their parodic
forms), rather than to the tradition of realist fiction. Indeed, the
play of verbal and grammatical functions – such as the puns and
anagrams indulged in here (the Gorfs actually live on anagrams)
– are not to be dismissed as juvenile tricks, but recognized as a
permanent and important aspect of Rushdie’s stylistic address.
But the narrative must take its course. After a fight in the bar,
where Jones is assaulted by O’Toole, Flapping Eagle goes to stay
at the Gribbs’ house, where he learns of his host’s determination
to return philosophy to the people in popular forms: ‘it’s all there
to use, in old wives’ tales, in tall stories, and most of all . . . in the
cliché’ (G. 129). Another strand is here caught from contemporary
media culture: McLuhan’s From Cliché to Archetype had appeared
in 1970. But Gribb is unwilling to enlighten Flapping Eagle about
Grimus, leaving him even more determined to find out for
himself ‘whether he was fact or fiction’ (G. 132). He is introduced
to the Cherkassovs (G. 137), Aleksandr and Irina, self-exiled
Russian aristocrats who are still living the revolution: ‘What were
we, after all, but dogs who had had their day? Night and the
executioner awaited us all’ (G. 139). Irina confides in Flapping
Eagle that she was frozen in time when three months pregnant,
her foetus ‘as frozen within me as the lovers on the grecian urn’
(G. 146). This prompts Jones’s observation that ‘Obsessionalism,
‘‘single-mindedness’’, the process of turning human beings into
the petrified, Simplified Men of K, was a defence against the
Effect’ – that is, against the play of relativities that constitutes real
existence (G. 149). Meanwhile, her idiot son (in another parodic
Beckettian image) plays draughts with chess pieces, locked in a
shed at the bottom of the garden. All these people are voluntarily
trapped. They have surrendered their complexity to the Island,
32
GRIMUS
and must now deny there is any other reality; or that there is a
Grimus to superintend it. Only Virgil Jones and Flapping Eagle
know better; only they can move about in the Dimensions. And
also the sinister Nick Deggle, previously exiled from the Island
(specifically to recruit Flapping Eagle: we have met him earlier, in
chapter 5), but now returned, with a piece he has snapped off the
Stone Rose, causing a malfunction in the reality system which is
registered by the recurrent ‘blink’ in the narrative. Flapping
Eagle’s temptation by the two women represents his own
‘obsession’. It is not for nothing that he is known as ‘Death’,
because when both Irina and Elfrida fall in love with him their
own fixed reality system begins to break down. As it turns out,
there are to be four funerals but no wedding in this novel; and
this reference to Mike Newell’s popular film (from 1994) is not
inappropriate, since the ‘flavour of . . . old films’ is another
element deliberately fed into the novel as part of its informed
cultural perspective. As Ignatius Gribb reflects at one point, ‘If he
was to be in a bad Western, he might as well wear the full
uniform’ (G. 183, 185).
It is at this point, in Part Three, that Flapping Eagle goes in
quest of Grimus himself, accompanied by Media, a whore from
Jocasta’s brothel with a suitably updated name who replaces
Virgil Jones in the series of allusions – now playing Beatrice to
his Dante. The crisis in the novel is reached when he finally
meets Grimus, in the two last (and longest) chapters. In the first
of these (chapter 54) the terms of the confrontation are set up –
to the effect that as Flapping Eagle he is Grimus’s double, with
whom conflict is therefore inevitable. We learn also (from Virgil
Jones’s Diary) of the discovery of the Stone Rose itself, the
‘geometric rose’ (G. 208), by Jones and Deggle, and Grimus’s
dominance through his superior handling of its powers. It is
Grimus who has led the other two on their ‘Conceptual Travels’
to the planet Thera (a transparent anagram of earth), and who
names and colonizes Calf Island itself; leaving them, however,
with an ontological uncertainty: ‘Impossible to say whether we
found the island or made it’ (G. 210–11). But, if the Rose is a
metaphor for the imagination, then this frozen world is an abuse
of the imagination – a case of the sterile ‘invention without
discovery’ considered in the introduction. This intellectually
compromised and morally corrupt proceeding was allegorized
33
SALMAN RUSHDIE
for the nineteenth century in Tennyson’s poem ‘The Palace of
Art’; and, as in that poem, things here start to go wrong. Deggle
tries to smash Grimus’s ‘infernal machine’, while Jones is
assailed by ‘an army of terrors from the recesses of my own
imagination’ – which Grimus puts down to ‘Dimension-fever’
(G. 216). It remains only for Liv to humiliate Flapping Eagle
sexually (‘breaking down the last barrier . . . his sexuality’) before
he is ready to meet Grimus on the same plane: ‘he has moved
from a state of what I should call self-consciousness to a state of
what I would humbly term Grimus-consciousness’ (G. 222).
The meeting takes place in Grimus’s house at the top of the
mountain – a mountain which is ‘a model for the structure and
workings of the human brain’ (G. 232). Mountains feature
regularly in Rushdie’s fiction, where they are associated both
with danger and with spiritual enlightenment. This association
derives among other sources from the landscape of the poem
The Conference of the Birds, and also from the story of the prophet
Muhammed ascending the mountain to hear the word of God –
an image that is, of course, central to The Satanic Verses. The
house itself is an ideal construction, a ‘rough triangular
labyrinth’ with mirrors for windows (G. 224–5), overtopped by
the ash tree Yggdrasil (re-transplanted from Joyce’s epic).
Grimus has built it ‘to enshrine my favourite things’, especially
birds: live birds, dead birds, ‘an audubon proliferation of
feathered heads, some real, some imaginary’, centring on an
image of ‘the Roc of Sinbad, the Phoenix of myth: Simurg himself’
(G. 229, 226). Alongside its function as a symbolic aviary, the
house serves as a metaphor of Grimus’s dissociation from the
world – again, much like the situation in Tennyson’s ‘Palace of
Art’ (as Calf Island itself ‘where time stood still’ (G. 138) recalls
the companion poem of withdrawal ‘The Lotus Eaters’); and the
moral of both poems is played out in what follows. Grimus has
decided he is complete in power and wisdom and has therefore
chosen to die. But, as the ‘blink’ reminds us, the continuing
existence of the island depends, moment by moment, on his
conceptualizing; and therefore he can only die like the Phoenix,
which ‘passes its selfhood on to its successors’ (G. 233), to be
instantly reborn in another identity. And Flapping Eagle has been
selected to play this role: ‘by shaping you to my grand design I
remade you as completely as if you had been unmade clay’(G.
34
GRIMUS
233). Flapping Eagle now recalls the delirious psychic voyage
through alternative selves from earlier in the novel, when he was
assailed by ‘the memory of a man searching for a voice in which
to speak’ (G. 236); this was the time of his wanderings (like the
Wandering Jew Ahuserius), explained now as part of Grimus’s
‘grand design’. But, aided by the simple presence of Media (the
fearful but faithful female), Flapping Eagle resists the nomination,
making the central moral accusation against Grimus for what he
has done to his world, to his kind – and to himself:
The Stone Rose has warped you, Grimus; its knowledge has made
you as twisted, as eaten away by power-lust, as its effect has stunted
and deformed the lives of the people you brought here. . . . An
infinity of continua, of possibilities both present and future, the freeplay of time itself, bent and shaped into a zoo for your personal
enjoyment. (G. 236)
Grimus alludes in the course of their conversation to his own past,
one that includes wars, prison camps, torture, and execution –
sufficiently emblematic of twentieth-century history; this is what
he has turned aside from, as Flapping Eagle perceives, ‘away from
the world, into books and philosophies and mythologies, until
these became his realities . . . and the world was just an awful
nightmare’ (G. 243). But even this is no excuse for abandoning his
humanity. ‘You are so far removed from the pains and torments
of the world you left and the world you made that you can even
see death as an academic exercise’ (G. 236).
As part of the prepared ritual of his death, Grimus (now ‘the
ancient infant’, in an imagined process of continuous reversal
that recalls Blake’s poem ‘The Mental Traveller’) and Flapping
Eagle are fused into one identity. The passage is rendered in
Rushdie’s most dense philosophic style:
Self. My self. Myself and he alone. Myself and his self in the glowing
bowl. Yes, it was like that. Myself and himself pouring out of ourselves
into the glowing bowl. . . . My son. The mind of Grimus rushing to me.
You are my son, I give you my life. I have become you, I have become you
are me. . . .The mandarin monk released into me in an orgasm of
thinking. . . . Like a beating of wings his self flying in. My son, my son,
what father fathered a son like this, as I do in my sterility. (G. 242–3)
One answer to Grimus’s rhetorical question might be Victor
Frankenstein, who fathered his own ‘son’ in the sterility of his
35
SALMAN RUSHDIE
scientific ambition. Immortality and sterility go together on Calf
Island, and the perversion of the procreative process – Mary
Shelley’s own nightmare theme – is part of Grimus’s dehumanizing programme. Assuming his new powers, Flapping Eagle
travels to Thera, to be instructed by the Gorf, Dota (whose
comments on Grimus’s abuse of the Rose puncture any excessive
solemnity: ‘It is a flagrant distortion of Conceptual Technology to use the
Rose to Conceptualize . . . coffee’ (G. 245) ). Grimus is brutally
murdered by O’Toole’s gang (again as part of his own design),
and his body burnt along with the symbolic ash tree and its
complement of mythological birds. It remains to be seen how the
new composite self of ‘I-Eagle’ will react. But, in the final moment
of crisis, he maintains his resistance to the sterilizing, simplifying
ideas of his mentor/maker: ‘The combined force of unlimited
power, unlimited learning, and a rarefied, abstract attitude to life
which exalted these two into the greatest goals of humanity, was
a force I-Eagle could not bring himself to life’ (G. 251). He
eliminates the Stone Rose (‘No, I-Eagle thought, the Rose is not
the supreme gift’), and Calf Mountain unmakes itself, ‘its
molecules and atoms breaking, dissolving, quietly vanishing into
primal, unmade energy. The raw material of being was claiming
its own’ (G. 251–3).
And one of these primal energies is sexual. Significantly, the
overthrow of Grimus is celebrated by the eventual coupling of
Flapping Eagle and Media, the ‘orgasm of thinking’ replaced by
sexual orgasm, our own ordinary (but also extraordinary) means
of access to the other, to the future, and to our own true
fulfilment: to all we know, and all we need to know on earth
(perhaps) of transcendence. There is some doubt as to how one
might interpret the end of the novel. The sexual solution with
Media has a strongly positive note, as if his and her identity are
salvaged in human terms. But we might equally understand that
Flapping Eagle dissolves along with Calf Island itself as a result
of his encounter with Grimus; as the price of his ‘human’
victory. (After all, we might risk the simple question: where
would he have to go?) It is instructive to compare this
ambiguous situation with the ‘dissolution’ of the narrator
Saleem Sinai at the end of Midnight’s Children: is this a metaphor
or is it a ‘real’ fictional death? The very terms in which one puts
the question reveal that it makes no difference to the resolution
36
GRIMUS
of the theme. But even here, one should note that the ‘relation’
between Grimus and Flapping Eagle is itself ambiguous. On the
one hand, Grimus is the author of Eagle’s metamorphoses, his
immortality, his access to an infinite number of alternative selves:
like a beneficent creator. But, on the other hand, he has only put
him through this ‘apprenticeship’ in order to prepare him for the
assumption of Grimus’s own role, as the tyrant of being, the One,
the Overmind (or over-artist). So the benefits of plural being are
offset by the threat (the certainty) of the petrification of his
humanity through the power of the Stone Rose. This makes
Grimus the first of Rushdie’s allegorical representations of the
recurrent opposition between the many and the one; and, clearly
enough, a dress rehearsal for the more recognizable materials
lined up against each other – inside each other – in The Satanic
Verses. (There is even an elision of angel/devil to ponder on: G.
31.) Grimus is a secular Imam; Grimus’s frozen time is the
equivalent of the ‘untime of the Imam’ in the later novel, the
establishment of a fixed, sacral eternity over the flexibility and
fallibility of human time.
Grimus is a young man’s novel; it is ambitious, over-literary,
philosophically overheated; a ‘novel of ideas’ in the doubtful
sense that it is the ideas that run the show. It is in this sense that
it may be considered ‘premature’. But it is also brilliant in its
design and successful in many of its devices; and if the ideas
run the show they are at least absorbing ideas.5 Rushdie himself
did the novel a disservice by conceding in one early interview
that it was ‘too clever for its own good’; better a book that is too
clever than one that is not clever enough. Reviewing his fiction
to date in a later interview, however, as a ‘body of work’, he is
prepared to allow Grimus its proper place: ‘I also see my first
novel . . . as part of this. Metaphysical concerns were present in a
different way in the first novel.’6 It is not so much unfortunate as
inappropriate, therefore, that some of Rushdie’s critics have
chosen to denounce the novel gravely as a failure. Brennan’s
schoolmasterly tone (‘this parable of crude acculturation’ . . . ’the
stance of complacent philosophical scepticism’), and Catherine
Cundy’s description of a ’chaotic fantasy with no immediately
discernible arguments of any import’ both choose to ignore the
novel’s essential humanism and high spirits.7 But the unprejudiced reader will stand a good chance of finding these out
for him or herself.
37
3
Midnight’s Children
One thousand and one, Rushdie reminds us halfway through
Midnight’s Children, is ‘the number of night, of magic, of
alternative realities’ (MC 212). And the novel is a modern
odyssey, an epic navigation through these alternative realities:
myth and history, memory and document, moonlight and
daylight; the refractions of art, the centripetal and centrifugal
dynamics of the self; the babel of languages, the alternating (and
competing) religious and political understandings of the world.
The challenge of Rushdie’s project is to create a fiction that does
justice to these multiple realities, bringing them together in a
way that allows each strand a voice, a presence, without
obliterating the others. Saleem Sinai refers at one point to the
‘two threads’ of his narrative, ‘the thread that leads to the ghetto
of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the
rhymeless, verbless poet’ (MC 46), but, although these are
indeed central strands, the weave is much richer and more
various than this phrase would suggest.
The basic narrative strategy is simple: the juxtaposition of the
public and the private, the historical and the biographical – in
what is, after all, a time-honoured technique, to be found in
Plutarch, Shakespeare and Walter Scott as well as in Rushdie’s
modern exemplars. And so the ‘birth-of-a-nation’ theme in the
novel is parallelled by the strictly synchronized birth of the
central character (and first-person narrator) Saleem Sinai,
representative as he is of the 1,001 magical children supposed
to have been born in that historical hour after the declaration of
independence by Jarwhal Nehru at the midnight before 15
August 1947. (Rushdie has since calculated that, in demographical
fact, at two births per second, around 7,000 children would
actually have been born during this time; so his magical number
38
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
turns out to be ‘a little on the low side’ (IH 26).) And the mode of
narration is (or appears to be) equally straightforward and well
tried: Saleem tells his story to a simple woman, Padma, as they
work together in the pickle factory that provides both a refuge for
them at the end of the narrative and a metaphor for the fictional
process itself. It is worth recalling, therefore, that the novel began
as a third-person ‘omniscient’ narrative, and threatened to
become engulfed in its materials until Rushdie hit upon the idea
of the narrator/narratee, which had the effect of both lightening
and focusing these same materials.1 It was a fortunate solution; as
many readers have testified, it is the relationship between Padma
and Saleem, made up of her interruptive comments and his
evasions, that provides our point of entry into the novel, and
sustains our interest through its many complications. (Although it
should be said the relationship has been read more critically from
a post-colonial standpoint, as exemplifying the patronizing
exploitation of the indigenous working class by a condescending
cosmopolitan author.)2
The relationship between the written and the spoken word is
a matter of ancient debate, and one question that arises within it
is how the novel can ever encompass orality: how much sense it
makes for Sterne to claim, for example, that writing is ‘but a
different name for conversation’.3 This has been the focus of
much of the commentary on Midnight’s Children. But, whatever
view we take of the evident artificiality of the conversation
between Saleem and Padma, it does allow Rushdie to develop a
narrative inflection which becomes characteristic – almost a
signature – from this point on. This is a process we might call
‘tessellation’, after the way tiles are laid to overlap on a roof,
whereby the narrative is always looping back in recapitulation,
and also looking forward (‘proleptically’) in anticipation. The
effect is to bring a depth of field to the present moment, creating
an impression of simultaneity and temporal suspension – as the
fluid present, the elusive now, is always pressed on by the past
and foreshadowed, drawn forward into the future. Saleem
describes himself at one point as writing at the apex of an
isosceles triangle, where past and present meet (MC 191); but
the projection into the future is also part of the fictional
geometry. One wonders, indeed, whether this is one reason that
the thirty chapters are not numbered – almost as if they could be
39
SALMAN RUSHDIE
shuffled around and read in any order (as is the design of Julio
Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch4) – so self-contained and interwoven
is each of them, reproducing (like the genetic code) the essential
information of the novel. Thus, perched in the middle of his
novel at the ‘Alpha and Omega’ chapter [16], Saleem announces
‘my story’s half-way point’, looking both back and forwards:
‘there are beginnings here, and all manner of ends’ (MC 218).
And, just as we have already visited the end of the story (‘It is
morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see
me . . . Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into
my story ahead of time’(MC 205) ), so when we approach the
actual conclusion the earlier scenes are recycled. The first two
pages of ‘A Wedding’ [chapter 28] are a good example; Saleem
can explain to Padma his marriage to Parvati-the-Witch only by
linking this back to the story of all the women in his life,
beginning (again) in ‘a blind landowner’s house on the shores of
a Kashmiri lake’, with Naseem Aziz his unmarried grandmother
(MC 391–2). ‘Once upon a time’; ‘I have told this story before’
(MC 209, 212, 354); the phrases borrowed from oral narrative
recur like a refrain through the novel, animating its texture.
Let us return to the structure of juxtapositions. Saleem is born
at midnight on 15 August 1947 – ‘at the precise instant of India’s
arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world’ (MC 11)
– and throughout the novel the threads are carefully crossstitched. In the chapter [14] ‘My Tenth Birthday’, ‘freak weather
– storms, floods, hailstones from a cloudless sky – . . . managed to
wreck the second Five Year Plan;’ – this on the very day Saleem
founds ‘my very own M.C.C. . . . the new Midnight Children’s
Conference’ (MC 202–3). He uses newspaper cuttings from the
year 1960 to compose the fatal communication to Commander
Sabarmati revealing his wife’s affair, and confesses to this as ‘my
first attempt at rearranging history’ (MC 252–3). The underlying
principle, or logic, is restated several times in the conversational
ebb and flow of the address, but nowhere more explicitly than at
the beginning of [chapter 17] ‘The Kolynos Kid’. Here Saleem
offers to ‘amplify, in the manner and with the proper solemnity
of a man of science, my claim to a place at the centre of things’
(MC 232). In a historical character the claim would be
preposterous; for a fictional narrator it is a truism, a condition
of his being at all. ‘I was linked to history both literally and
40
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our
(admirably modern) scientists might term ‘‘modes of connection’’ composed of ‘‘dualistically-combined configurations’’ of
the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above’ (MC 232).
Without agreeing with his position (which is typically exclusive),
one can see what Timothy Brennan means when he says that
Rushdie is ‘best seen as a critic’ rather than as a novelist at all,
since his novels are so uncompromisingly metafictional; they are
not so much (he says) novels in themselves as ‘novels about
Third-World novels’.5 But the irony of Saleem’s ‘claims’ need
not have such a distancing or alienating effect. Indeed, this is
how Rushdie conducts the delicate negotiation between fact and
fiction in the novel, which has been well described by Andrzej
Gasiorek:
Midnight’s Children is . . . a double-voiced narrative in which a personal
discourse of self-discovery interacts with, and is constrained by, a
public discourse of history and politics. . . . [it] persistently admonishes
those who either succumb to private fantasies about the world or
distort it for political purposes. . . . Rushdie’s narrative mode does not
seek to do away with the distinction between fantasy and reality but
shows how strange and unstable was the political reality of the time.6
It is in these terms that we have to read the chapter [21] ‘Drainage
and Desert’, as an elaborate but also ironic correspondence
between Saleem’s own life story so far and the progress of the
Indo-Chinese border war of 1962 (MC 286–7). Likewise, we are
invited to believe that ‘the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani
war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my
benighted family from the face of the earth’ (MC 327). Saleem is
drawn to conflict: ‘the belligerent events of 1971’, the civil war in
Pakistan, deliver him up as a guide in the Pakistani army;
prompting his disappearance in to the Sundarbans and his
reappearance seven months later into ‘the world of armies and
dates’ (MC 356). India’s first nuclear explosion in May 1974
coincides pointedly with the return of the warlike Shiva
(Saleem’s anti-self) into the narrative, while the painfully
protracted labour of Parvati to deliver her child Aadam parallels
the period of thirteen days in June 1975 between the returning
of the guilty verdict on Mrs Gandhi and her seizure of
emergency powers (MC 420–4). Saleem himself becomes a
victim of the compulsory sterilization programme adopted
41
SALMAN RUSHDIE
under these powers, providing a final metaphor for the
expunging of the hope of the Indian people – ‘sperectomy’ –
at the hands of certain Indian politicians.
The problematic terms of the relationship between history and
lived experience are deliberately brought into question by
Rushdie through the factual errors introduced into the narrative
– which may be understood as a kind of immunization, for the
reader, against too uncritical a reading. Rushdie’s own essay
‘Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children’ considers this very
question: how, ‘using memory as our tool . . . we remake the past
to suit our present purposes’. His hero’s story is in this sense
exemplary: ‘The reading of Saleem’s unreliable narration might
be . . . a useful analogy for the way in which we all, every day,
attempt to ‘‘read’’ the world’ (IH 24–5). In the novel itself he
confesses that ‘re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in
chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in
these pages, on the wrong date.’ And this cannot now be
corrected: ‘in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong
time’ (MC 164). Of course, in a sense the assassination will
always have been ‘at the wrong time’, and the reader is expected
to pick up on this; but the error prompts the narrator’s question:
‘Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in
my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort
everything – to rewrite the whole history of my times purely in
order to place myself in a central role?’ (MC 164). It is left for the
reader to judge – this is his right and his ‘responsibility’, to use
the term from Keith Wilson’s essay.7 But the implicit answer is
no, because there is always more to history than the facts. (‘Some
legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts’
(MC 47).)
We do have to ‘build reality’ from scraps of information (MC
412), and Midnight‘s Children is solidly built of facts and figures,
dates and events, that are incontrovertible: from Amritsar,
Bangladesh, and Bhopal to Queen Victoria, two world wars
and General Zia. But the story we end up with will always be
conditional, ‘open at both ends’. If ‘reality is question of
perspective’ (MC 164) – an axiom that also galvanizes Gulliver’s
Travels – then the perspective of a living observer (and
participant) will always be changing, switching between the
two poles of a supposedly subjective or ostensibly objective
42
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
standpoint. This, we should remember, is how the imagination
works; and we have been warned against its capacity for error
and distortion. The subjective view is unreliable for two reasons:
owing to the fallibility of both our perceptions and our
memories. Our perceptions to start with are subject to the
moment-by-moment fluctuations of consciousness. Although
Rushdie is not to be described as a psychological novelist in the
manner of Joyce or Virginia Woolf, in that his own narrative
point of view is typically epic and externalized (‘must we look’,
asks Saleem, ‘beyond psychology’ (MC 143) ), he is nevertheless
acutely aware of the unpredictability of our cognitive processes
and the fragility of ‘the mind’s divisions between fantasy and
reality’ (MC 165). We have seen how this was a central theme of
Grimus, and it will provide a major preoccupation of The Satanic
Verses; but (as the quotation just given indicates) it is a minor
theme of Midnight’s Children as well. The macro-scale of history is
always related back to the micro-scale of the individual. ‘Religion
was the glue of Pakistan,’ we are told in [chapter 24] ‘The
Buddha’, ‘holding the halves together’; and then the analogy is
immediately made with consciousness: ‘just as consciousness, the
awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of
past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our
then and our now’ (MC 341). The historical epic scene must
always contain the personal lyric self.
The deposit of perception and experience in the memory
introduces another variable, because the memory has its own
transforming function: it ‘selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates,
minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies’, and in so doing it ‘creates its
own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of
events’ (MC 207). Coherent within its own terms, we may notice,
rather than reliably correspondent to any external scheme of
things; we might reasonably invoke the philosophers’ use of
precisely these terms to describe alternative epistemological
systems. It is worth noting, also, the closeness of this description
of the memory to that Rushdie gives of the imagination in an
essay quoted above, in Chapter 1 (p. 10). It is the powerful but
unpredictable functioning of these faculties that makes us
human beings, with all our dangerous potential for good and
evil, rather than behavioural automata or cyberpets. The
aggregation of these subjectivities on the demographic scale
43
SALMAN RUSHDIE
introduces another level of unreality, beyond the memorial
grasp of any individual. ‘Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten
million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan–
Bangladesh into India – but ten million (like all numbers larger
than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood’ (MC 346).
What Rushdie refers to elsewhere as ‘all this cold history’ (MC
186) means nothing unless warmed, brought to life, by the
individual consciousness.
The conclusion that is borne in upon us is that a history is put
together, invented, by a people, just as a person is invented by
circumstance (and as a character is invented in a novel). The
creation of India itself, celebrated in the chapter [8] ‘Tick, Tock’,
its coming into being at a designated moment in time, is a ‘mass
fantasy’, a ‘new myth’, a ‘collective fiction’:
because a nation which had never previously existed was about to
win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had
five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of
chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless
quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never
exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in
a dream we all agreed to dream . . . (MC 111)
And if we draw the focus back further, from historical time to
mythical time, we achieve yet another dislocation in our
perspective. Talking to Saleem’s grandfather Aadam Aziz, Tai
the boatman claims ‘an antiquity so immense it defied
numbering’; his ‘magical talk’ derives from ‘the most remote
Himalayas of the past’: ‘I have watched the mountains being
born; I have seen Emperors die’ (MC 16–17). The prehistorical
Bombay of the fishermen is invoked ‘at the dawn of time . . . in
this primeval world before clocktowers’ (MC 92). And even as
Saleem recalls the moment of his birth, made so significant by its
coincidence with that of his country, he then locates this
moment in the ‘long time’ of Hindu myth to provide a
vertiginous sense of ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’:8
Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August
15th, 1947 – but in another version, that inescapable date is no more
than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga . . . [which] began on Friday, February 18th, 3102 B.C; and will last a mere
432,000 years! Already feeling somewhat dwarfed, I should add
nevertheless that the Age of Darkness is only the fourth phase of the
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MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
present Maha-Yuga cycle which is, in total, ten times as long; and
when you consider that it takes a thousand Maha-Yugas to make just
one Day of Brahma, you’ll see what I mean about proportion. (MC
191)
Now: the ambivalent status of this ‘collective fantasy’ will
obviously reflect on the ability of the artist (as well as the
historian) to represent it. And this is where we can move on
from an account of the parallel structure of Midnight’s Children to
consider the nature of the fictional discourse itself.
Interestingly (and – as is made clear from reading his later
work – typically), Rushdie provides several surrogate portraits of
the artist within the novel, each of whom contributes in some
way to the metafictional level; that is, the commentary within
the text on artistic problems and procedures. The first of these is
Tai the boatman (who has been introduced above), a kind of
Charon figure, also described as a ‘watery Caliban, rather too
fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy’ (MC 16). Tai will not be taxed as
to his real age, any more than Haroun’s father (later) will tell
only true stories; that is not the point. And he is, of course,
illiterate: ‘literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping
hand’ (MC 17). From his ‘magical words’ Aadam Aziz learns ‘the
secrets of the lake’ (MC 18), and much else besides. A demotic
Tiresias, Tai is as old as memory itself – the embodiment of the
oral tradition, and the source of all storytelling. But where there
is no claim, no provocation, there is no artistic hubris, no
transgression; Tai is as innocent in this exchange as at his death
(significantly, at the hands of partitionist fanatics). But we soon
hear of a painter with more questionable aims, ‘whose paintings
had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life
into his art’ (MC 48) – and who commits suicide out of
disappointment. Later on, Lifafa Das the peep-show man
presents a similar case. He has his promotional patter: ‘ ‘‘Come
see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi,
come see India, come see’’ . . . ‘‘see the whole world, come see
everything!’’ ’ Das reminds Saleem of Nadir Khan’s friend the
painter, and he asks himself ‘is this an Indian disease, this urge
to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?’
(MC 73–5). His scriptwriter uncle Hanif provides another
example, as he turns his back on myth and fantasy in favour
of social realism.
45
SALMAN RUSHDIE
‘Sonny Jim,’ he informed me, ‘this damn country has been dreaming
for five thousand years. It’s about time it started waking up.’ Hanif
was fond of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes,
against, in fact, the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the
temple of illusions, he had become the high priest of reality . . . (MC
237)
Hanif’s realism is no less questionable than any other representation; and there is an ironic self-reference in that Hanif’s latest
script concerns ‘the Ordinary Life of a Pickle Factory’ (MC 236),
guying the very metaphoric locus where Rushdie’s novel will end.
Even Saleem’s old friend Picture Singh, the snake-charmer from
the magicians’ ghetto, is humbled by a heckler’s gibe during his
performance ‘which had questioned the hold on reality which
was his greatest pride’ (MC 399). In each case, the artist here has
tried to claim a franchise on reality which is untenable. The
limitless ‘real’ may be enticed by the ‘true’, but it can never be
contained by it. Tai the boatman would have known better.
Saleem-as-author has himself confessed to these irreverent
imaginings. He succumbs to the belief that ‘I was somehow
creating a world’, where real people ‘acted at my command’:
‘which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and
thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw
unshaped material of my gift’ (MC 172). He does have some
excuse for his ‘self-aggrandizement’ here, in that, ‘if I had not
believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their
massed identities would have annihilated mine.’ The fact that
this is precisely what happens at the end of the novel establishes
another self-reflexive commentary: the artist cannot, in the end,
stand against either the tide or the dust of history. And so what
are presented as Saleem’s ‘problems with reality’ (MC 421)
approximate to Rushdie’s own. In the last chapter, as ‘an infinity
of new endings clusters round my head’ – including Padma’s
conventional happy ending – he has to resist the seductions of
fantasy, of mere imagining. More insistent even than Padma,
‘reality is nagging at me’. And, because of his response to this,
his thirty picklejar chapters preserve ‘the authentic taste of
truth’ (MC 428, 444). The taste of truth: it is an interesting
formula. A formula for fiction, where (as Saleem remarks earlier)
‘what’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same’: ‘True,
for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the
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MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
stories Mary Pereira told me’ (MC 79). We cannot ‘produce’
reality to order, but we can recognize the truth, in what is a
complex act of moral and imaginative recognition. This is a truth
which neither requires ‘evidence’, nor is undermined by the
discourse of ‘magic realism’ into which the narrative frequently
switches. This gives us blood that falls as rubies, tears as
diamonds; and the whole chapter ([14] ‘My Tenth Birthday’) on
the miraculous qualities of the midnight children themselves.
‘To anyone whose personal cast of mind is too inflexible to
accept these facts, I have this to say: That’s how it was; there can
be no retreat from the truth’ (MC 194).
And this is in the end how the novel defends itself, and
establishes its own integrity. Not by protestation: there can be
‘no proof’ of the fact that Naseem ‘eavesdropped on her
daughters’ dreams’ (MC 56), nor of the sterilization of the
midnight children: the evidence ‘went up in smoke’ (MC 424).
Rushdie could repeat Sidney’s celebrated axiom: ‘for the poet,
he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.’9 And in a sense
he does so, when he claims that literature is ‘self-validating’ (IH
14); validated by what Wordsworth appealed to in his ‘Preface to
the Lyrical Ballads’ as that ‘truth which is its own testimony’, the
internal evidence of art itself.’10 And this ‘evidence’ is provided
by the confidence with which, in Midnight’s Children, the
different discourses are allowed to play alongside and against
each other, the wonderful free-style of the narration – more
cursive than coercive – that draws as it needs from a miscellany of
styles and modes. It is this confidence that allows Rushdie to use
the double-sided, reversible formula from oral tradition – ‘I was in
the basket, but also not in the basket’ (MC 368) – which is more
systematically invoked as the imaginative axis of The Satanic Verses,
but plays its relevant part here. It is the formula that asserts
nothing, that leaves everything suspended in the light wind of
fictional hypothesis; that can build on sand, on water (like Dr
Narlikar’s tetrapods), or maintain itself in the air. It is this
confidence that gives Rushdie access to that fictive plenitude, that
generosity of vision and prodigality of incarnation that is best
described (in its generic aspect) by Mikhail Bakhtin, and by critics
who operate on a Bakhtinian wavelength.11
The very metaphor of the ‘wavelength’ reminds us of a
specially important means of access to fictive plenitude in the
47
SALMAN RUSHDIE
novel: not just the radio itself, key though it is to the operation of
the Midnight Children’s Conference, but telecommunications
generally, both as instrument and image. The instrumentality of
telecommunications is underlined by the narrator himself, as
Saleem recommends his ‘future exegetes’ to consider the
intervention of ‘a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications. Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my
undoing’ (MC 287). Not only Saleem’s undoing, we may add.
The telephone plays a sinister part in many of Rushdie’s fictions:
‘squat at the ear of Eve, familiar toad’, in the Miltonic phrase, it
replaces the serpent as the contemporary tempter, equivocator,
and general conduit of evil. Edenic possibilities in both The
Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh are also destroyed by it. In
Midnight’s Children it is over the telephone that Saleem’s mother
gives away the secret of her meetings with ex-husband Nadir,
and that Lila Sabarmati betrays her adulterous liaison – bringing
about three deaths. The mass media play their part as well.
Saleem’s birth is announced in the newspaper, and many of the
historical events in the novel are brought to us over the radio.
Disdaining old-fashioned omniscience, this narrator prefers to
use more modern forms of mediation; a feature that adds to the
plurality of voices through which the novel is articulated. And
this exploitation of the media is on reflection unsurprising,
when we think, for example, of how Marshall McLuhan
welcomed them in the 1960s as ‘the extensions of man’, the
elaboration of our very nervous system – bringing with them a
new definition of consciousness. (The fact that McLuhan makes
a parodic appearance in Grimus – as he did, in person, in Woody
Allen’s film Annie Hall – underlines the convergence of ideas.)
Dickens, we know, turned newspapers to good account in the
middle of the previous century: what more refractions of his
world might he not have offered us via radio and television?
And it was Kipling, another celebrated journalist, who was one
of the first to bring the modern media into fiction, with his
stories ‘Mrs Bathhurst’ (where the plot centres on a fragment of
remembered film) and ‘Wireless’ (on the quasi-mystical seductions of early, pre-regulation radio broadcasts).12 Does this
represent another debt owed by Rushdie to those he has already
acknowledged to the author of Kim? As the chapter [12] ‘AllIndia Radio’ explains, the telepathic radio also functions as the
48
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
main line of communication between the midnight children –
with Saleem as the sensitive receiver. To begin with, the voices
assail him as ‘a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned
radio’, but he soon learns to use the new instrument:
By sunrise, I had discovered that the voices could be controlled – I
was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could
select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off
my newly-discovered inner ear. It was astonishing how soon fear left
me; by morning, I was thinking, ‘Man, this is better than All-lndia
Radio, man; better than Radio Ceylon!’ (MC 161–2)
He even goes so far, later, as to complain that he seems to be
‘stuck with this radio metaphor’ (MC 221); as indeed he is, until
the untimely sinus operation deprives him of his special gift.
But, as we might expect, in a verbal art form that aspires to the
pictorial; that strains, as Joseph Conrad urged it should, to make
us see, it is the visual media that offer themselves most readily
for metaphoric elaboration. Early on, Saleem plays such
variations on his ‘memory of a mildewed photograph’ of his
father Aadam Aziz shaking hands with Mian Abdullah (the
Hummingbird), with the formidable Rani of Cooch Naheen in
the background. The photograph is not simply ‘described’; it is
milked of its visuality to provide a soundtrack (‘there is a
conversation going on in the photograph’), an interpretation of
a key phase in Indian politics of the 1930s (‘Beyond the door,
history calls’ (MC 45) ). Photography is used elsewhere; we meet
a ‘Times of India staff photographer, who was full of sharp tales
and scurrilous stories’ (MC 240), and it is an Eastman-Kodak
portrait that provides ‘Picture Singh’ with his nickname (MC
368). But it is film that provides more dynamic images for the
novel. It was not just for effect that Rushdie once claimed in an
interview that the films of Buñuel had had more influence on
him as a writer than the work of James Joyce; and it is the
cinema above all that provides him with a reference point, an
adaptable metaphor for the manipulation of point of view. This
is how he describes his spying through the window on the
meetings of his mother, Amina, and her one-time husband
Nadir Khan in the Pioneer Cafe: ‘what I’m watching here on my
dirty glass cinema-screen is, after all, an Indian movie . . . ’ (MC
212–13). And (in an often-quoted passage), the processes of
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
perception and retrospection themselves are interpreted via the
cinema screen.
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past,
the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the
present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose
yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and
gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed
against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing
grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion
dissolves – or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is
reality . . . (MC 164)
Rushdie quotes the passage in his essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’
to make the point that we cannot hope to see the present clearly,
as a ‘whole picture’; there will be inevitable distortion (IH 13).
One might remark here that there is an unhappy irony in the
fact that Rushdie and other interested parties have encountered
insuperable difficulties in attempting to bring this most filmable
of novels to the screen. The governments of both India and Sri
Lanka have refused to provide locations for the film, allegedly
for fear of alienating Muslim communities. And as Rushdie has
observed: you cannot construct Bombay in a studio.13
It is curious, in this connection, that Timothy Brennan chooses
to take Rushdie to task for his use of the media, suggesting that
this is another instance of ideological compromise, a sell-out to
Western values – as defined by ‘the media and the market’.
Rushdie is accused of ‘historicizing events without processing
them . . . in the manner of the media’, and of responding to
events according to ‘the way in which the news and media
desensitise our response’. He is seen by this critic as being
complicit in the process whereby ‘ ‘‘native’’ or local culture
seems to be rendered meaningless by a communications
network that effortlessly crosses borders and keeps an infinite
stock of past artistic styles’; and – finally – as investing in that
‘crossbreeding of market and media’ which ‘produces an
inhuman blob, as faceless as it is powerful.’14 Andrzej Gasiorek,
by contrast, argues that Rushdie stands outside the frame of his
media references, offering a critique of rather than a collaboration with their operations (which is surely the case: one has
only to think of the savage satire of the news media in chapter
[23] ‘How Saleem Achieved Purity’; the ‘divorce between news
50
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
and reality’, the ‘mirages and lies’ (MC 323-4) ); and Steven
Connor goes so far as to propose that it is the interface of prose
fiction with the electronic media which provides the very grain
and substance/quality of Rushdie’s vision. ‘Rushdie exploits the
forms and resources of the medium of radio, along with those of
film and, in later novels . . . of television and video, because such
forms are the evidence of a fundamentally new relationship
between public and private life.’ If the realist novel, says Connor,
explored the differentiation of public and private, ‘by contrast the
forms of contemporary mass culture bring about a mutual
permeation of the private and public, such that the integrity of
both is dissolved and a relationship of difference is no longer
possible between them’.15 This is McLuhan’s prophecy restated as
cultural fact, and as such the observation offers a valuable
comment on how Rushdie’s fiction actually works.
But there is another important theme which we have touched
on only glancingly so far, which requires further consideration
at the end of this chapter. This is the theme of birth itself –
announced in the very first sentence – which functions as the
central metaphor of the novel, generating everything else. It is,
after all, and axiomatically, through birth that newness enters the
world; and it is through a complex and elaborated system of
metaphors of birth and rebirth that Rushdie moves from merely
physical propagation outwards to psychological, cultural, and
political formations. It is also worth remarking that this is the
most relevant context of his debt to Sterne, because it is the
generative, obstetrical, and pediatric imagery in Tristram Shandy
that provides a model for Rushdie’s own exploration of these
ideas. A good deal of critical attention has been lavished on the
theme of problematic parentage in Rushdie,16 which is understandable, since it recurs in all his novels and is (he himself
reminds us) an important circumstance in both the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana, the founding epics of India. But the fact of
birth itself – what cannot occur, we remember, on Calf Island –
is for Rushdie a much more powerful and pervasive idea,
providing the ground for metaphors of rebirth also, which may
actually be invested with greater symbolic power (as Robinson
Crusoe’s rebirth onto his desert island, when he is delivered up
by a wave from ‘deep in its own body’,17 is more eloquent than
the bald birth announcement in the novel’s first sentence).
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
Midnight’s Children is unambiguously a nativity novel. It
begins with Saleem Sinai’s own birth announcement, and ends
not with a death (or even a marriage) but with the dissolution of
that single citizen of India and his unique identity into the mass,
the undifferentiated energies of the new and always renewable
nation. Rushdie has commented on this ending: ‘The story of
Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a
manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the
Indian talent for non-stop regeneration’ (IH 16). The actual
moment of Saleem’s birth, in the countdown chapter [8] ‘Tick,
Tock’, is related as a lyrical counterpoint between Amina’s
accelerating contractions and the birth of India itself: ‘The
monster in the streets has already begun to celebrate; the new
myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with
corpuscles of saffron and green’ (MC 114). It is significant that
this scene and its attendant circumstances are revisited
throughout the novel: Dr Narlikar’s Bombay Nursing Home is
one of its key locations. Not the least reason for this, of course, is
that it is here that Mary Pereira switches the two newborn boys,
so that Saleem (who is actually the child of the serving-woman
Vanita and the Englishman William Methwold) is brought up to
a life of privilege by Shiva’s biological parents, Amina and
Ahmed Sinai; meanwhile, Shiva becomes the street-bred
criminal and militarist, Saleem’s ordained opposite.18 And there
are also other births recorded: not only the ‘collective birth’ of
the midnight children themselves, but the births of parents,
siblings, cousins, children, in a kind of fertility ritual that serves
to contradict the infamous sterilization programme of the
‘Green Witch’ Indira Gandhi, and to suggest the adoption of
one sentence from the novel as its epigraph: ‘no new place is
real until it has seen a birth’ (MC 102). One filament of the birth
theme is taken up in the metaphor of the perforated sheet that
appears at the end of the first chapter, where Dr Aziz is invited
to examine his future wife through ‘a crude circle about seven
inches in diameter’ cut in a sheet held by two women (MC 23).
The hole in the sheet develops into a complex metaphor for our
access via the perforated hymen to the place of conception and
the avenue of birth, and eventually through life to death, via the
last exit of the pyre or the tomb. But the sheet also suggests the
circumscription of our perceptions themselves (as it functioned
52
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
literally for Dr Aziz); and the ‘pointillist’, accumulative process
necessary to build these into a coherent vision and narrative. As
such, it provides a central point (or gap?) of reference, to which
Rushdie frequently recurs: as when his sister Jamila Singer
performs in public behind a perforated veil (MC 304), or where
Saleem’s grandmother appears to him, ‘staring down through
the hole in a perforated cloud, waiting for my death so that she
could weep a monsoon for forty days’ (MC 444).
But it is possible to locate a more specific reference even to the
moment of conception itself, lodged at the centre of the most
mysterious chapter in Midnight’s Children: [25] ‘In the Sundarbans’. This chapter is in some respects the key to the novel, in
that it homes in on the principle of transformability/metamorphosis – performing a function not unlike the visit to the Cave of
Spleen in book IV of Pope’s Rape of the Lock: another Ovidian
excursus from the social–historical plane. Rushdie made some
very interesting comments on this section of the novel in his
interview with John Haffenden:
if you are going to write an epic, even a comic epic, you need a
descent into hell. That chapter is the inferno chapter, so it was
written to be different in texture from what was around it. Those
were among my favourite ten or twelve pages to write, and I was
amazed at how they divided people so extremely.19
In this chapter the man-dog Saleem (known at this stage as
‘Buddha’ because of his taciturnity) deserts from the Pakistani
army into which he has been recruited as a tracker, along with
the three young soldiers he is meant to be guiding, ‘into the
historyless anonymity of rain-forests’ (MC 349), effectively
deserting the historical surface of the fiction for another,
atavistic plane: ‘an overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic
longing for flight into the safety of dreams.’ Not that dreams are
necessarily safe places in Rushdie’s fiction, and indeed this
amorphous world yields Saleem ‘both less and more . . . than he
had expected’. Time falls away (‘hours or days or weeks’), scale
becomes distorted (‘the jungle was gaining in size’), they
surrender to ‘the logic of the jungle . . . the insanity of the
jungle . . . the turbid, miasmic state of mind which the jungle
induced’ (MC 350–l). The difference of texture has to do with the
depth of reference in the passage. We are made to think not so
53
SALMAN RUSHDIE
much of Swift’s disoriented Gulliver as of Conrad’s Marlow from
Heart of Darkness (‘Going up that river was like travelling back to
the earliest beginnings of the world . . . ’); perhaps of the
characters in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, driven back in
their dreams to an archaic, antediluvian existence. 20 The
soldiers’ project, ‘which had begun far away in the real world’,
has acquired ‘in the altered light of the Sundarbans a quality of
absurd fantasy which enabled them to dismiss it once and for
all’. History has not forgotten them, in that they are haunted by
the ghosts of those they have killed (‘each night [the forest] sent
them new punishments’). And when they have done penance
enough, they begin to regress towards infancy, before being
brought again to themselves: ‘so it seemed that the magic jungle,
having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them
by the hand towards a new adulthood’ (MC 351–3).
Saleem, however, has to undergo a more complex process of
renewal, involving not only rebirth but ‘reconception’; and it is
here that we have the last twist of the metaphor. ‘But finally the
forest found a way through to him; one afternoon, when rain
pounded down on the trees and boiled off them as steam,
Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree
while a blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into,
his heel’ (MC 353). Whereas Sterne’s Tristram Shandy begins
with the actual conception of Tristram, Midnight’s Children
appears not to include this detail (we focus exclusively on his
birth). But what Rushdie has actually done, it seems, is to ‘delay’
Saleem’s real conception until this moment later in his life. The
blind snakes of the Sundarbans are as it were spermatozoa; the
bite in the heel (mythologically a vulnerable part) is the decisive
moment where life takes hold. This provides an unusually
complete, elaborated, and satisfying version of the metaphor of
rebirth, which imitates ‘all the myriad complex processes that go
to make a man’, linking him to the evolutionary chain of DNA as
well as to his own personal history (‘I was rejoined to the
past . . . ’). But Saleem, though reconceived, is not yet reborn;
significantly, he cannot yet remember his birthright, his name.
The dislocations of the magical journey continue, as the four
move (again like Conrad’s Marlow) ‘ever further into the dense
uncertainty of the jungle’ and come upon a ‘monumental
Hindu temple’ appropriately decorated with ‘friezes of men and
54
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
women . . . coupling in postures of unsurpassable athleticism
and . . . of highly comic absurdity’ (MC 354–5). The temple is a
shrine to the ‘fecund and awful’ goddess Kali – a reminder that
the Sundarbans episode functions first and foremost as an erotic
fantasy; the descent into hell is also a recovery of our repressed,
elemental selves.
The rebirth motifs in this section prepare Saleem for his
deliverance from Pakistan in Parvati’s basket and his return to
India – where, as the narrative hurries self-consciously and
precipitously towards its conclusion, the last five chapters
feature the rise of Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party (with herself
as the ‘Black Widow’, the wicked witch to balance Parvati); the
symbolic destruction by Sanjay’s troops of the magicians’
ghetto, and the persecution and elimination of the children of
midnight themselves in the grotesque episode of the vasectomists. This reflects the scandalous abuse of the mass sterilization
programme of 1975, a genocidal crime against the Indian people
that has had other reverberations in Rushdie’s work. The
fulfilment of the symmetrical intention of the plot is reached
when the unmanned Saleem marries his true midnight sister,
Parvati-the-Witch, who is pregnant with Shiva’s child: thus
ensuring that their son Aadam Sinai – the son to all three of
them – is actually the true great-grandchild of the couple who
glimpsed each other through the perforated sheet in the first
chapter of the novel. Parvati is killed in the ghetto; her sickly
child suffers in sympathy with ‘the larger, macrocosmic disease’,
recovering after the emergency thanks to the ministrations of ‘a
certain washerwoman, Durga by name, who had wet-nursed
him through his sickness, giving him the daily benefit of her
inexhaustibly colossal breasts’ (MC 408, 429). Shiva has played
his destructive part in the suppression of the midnight children,
provoking Saleem even to lie about his death; but, unlike the
errors in the narrative (deliberate and unintentional), which stand
their dubious ground, this lie is retracted (MC 425–7). And so
Saleem can move towards his summation with a clear conscience.
‘Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and
you will gain an understanding of the age in which you live. (The
reverse of this statement is also true.)’ (MC 416–7). In fact both sets
of terms are reversible here, which is presumably Rushdie’s
intention – reminding us once again of the licence of fiction to
55
SALMAN RUSHDIE
equivocate, to have it both ways. It remains only for Saleem to
marry the strong-armed Padma, and for Rushdie/Saleem to leave
us drowsed with the fume of the pickle factory where the fiction
is being confected; surrendering himself, his multiple selves (it
seems, willingly enough), to the numbers marching in millions, to
the multitudinous identity of the new and always renewable
nation. And surrendering his novel, it might be added, to the
multiplicity of its possible readings.
56
4
Shame
Published only two years after Midnight’s Children, which had
enjoyed such extraordinary success, Rushdie’s third novel Shame
brought disappointment. First to the reviewers, who were
generally unenthusiastic; then to Rushdie himself, when it
failed to win the Booker Prize that year. (The author’s public
displeasure on this occasion was the beginning of a soured
relationship with the ‘literary world’ – or, at least, its gossip
columnists.1) Finally, it has to be said that Rushdie’s critics have
tended to line up against the novel, treating it as the weak twin
or dark shadow of Midnight’s Children. Timothy Brennan finds it
‘simply meaner, seedier, a bad joke’; Aijaz Ahmad ‘bleak and
claustrophobic’, deformed by racism and sexism; Catherine
Cundy ‘a model of closed construction’.2 Malise Ruthven
suggested that ‘the whole novel recalls nothing so much as the
crude drawings of Steve Bell, the British radical cartoonist’.
James Harrison observes that ‘Midnight’s Children is a Hindu
novel and Shame a Muslim one’, stressing the continuity but also
the essential difference between them; an implicit judgement
which is spelt out by Keith Booker, reflecting on ‘why Islam so
often surfaces in Rushdie’s fiction as a symbol of monologic
thought. Time and again, Rushdie emphasizes the fact that
Islam is the religion of one God, a monotheism that forms a
particularly striking symbol in the context of heteroglossic,
polytheistic India.’3 Rushdie has protested that this is a
misreading (‘it’s . . .wrong to see Midnight’s Children as the India
book and Shame as the Pakistan book’), but the conclusion is
hard to resist – especially when in the same interview quoted
here he refers to the two novels in comparative terms: Shame is,
he concedes, ‘nastier than Midnight’s Children, or at least the
nastiness goes on in a more sustained way . . . it’s not written so
affectionately . . . it’s a harder and darker book.’4
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
As has been suggested in Chapter 1, one of the recurrent
problems in Shame is the instability of its fictional discourse,
which in turn has something to do with the instability of
Pakistan itself and Rushdie’s own ambivalent feelings towards it.
What kind of book is this, about what kind of place, and
inhabited by what kind of characters? These questions cannot be
avoided because Rushdie raises them within the text, in a series
of anecdotes which are relevant to the subject and genesis of the
novel. The most important of these concerns the creation of
Pakistan itself, the political entity and the name.
It is well known that the term ‘Pakistan’, an acronym, was originally
thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the
Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the
‘tan’, they say, for Baluchistan. . . . A palimpsest obscures what lies
beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian
history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of
Pakistani Standard Time. (S. 87)
Unlike the creation of modern India, endorsed in all its
miscellaneousness in Midnight’s Children, the creation of Pakistan is presented as an unnatural birth, ‘a duel between two
layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through
what-had-been-imposed’. The palimpsest peels and fragments;
perhaps, Rushdie concludes, ‘the place was just insufficiently
imagined . . . a miracle that went wrong’. The critical temptation is
to respond that Rushdie’s novel of Pakistan is contaminated
with the same failure of imagination: the layers of discourse
peel, the fiction fails to cohere.
It may be thought disconcerting, for example, that the Rushdie
who understands ‘the importance of escaping from autobiography’5 should wander into the text in carpet slippers to tell us
how he ‘returned home, to visit my parents and sisters and to
show off my firstborn son’ (S. 26), and that he should derisively
mimic the arguments of those native Pakistanis who would deny
him a voice: ‘Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you,
with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking
about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies?‘ (S. 28).
These gestures have the effect of undermining Rushdie’s
attempt to provide an imaginative location for his story. ‘The
country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two
countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or
58
SHAME
almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like
myself, at a slight angle to reality’ (S. 29). Rushdie has
legitimately claimed, in an essay, that the only ‘frontiers’ in
fiction are ‘neither political nor imaginative but linguistic’ (IH
69). It is unnerving, therefore, that he should describe himself at
one moment as ‘inventing what never happened to me’ (S. 28),
with all the confidence of fiction, and yet insisting at another
that ‘I have not made this up’ (S. 241). The distinction becomes
precarious when Rushdie switches to the discourse of the
‘realistic novel ’, inserting a two-page dossier of ‘real-life
material’ from contemporary Pakistan (which includes details
of a contested mark in ‘my youngest sister’s geography essay’),
alongside incriminating evidence relating to state censorship,
industrial production, Ayub Khan’s alleged Swiss bank account,
and the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – whose fictional standin, Iskander Harappa, awaits the same fate later in the novel.
Rushdie assures us at this point that he prefers the form of what
he disingenuously calls his ‘modern fairy-tale’ because realism
‘can break a writer’s heart’ (S. 69–70); but this kind of prevarication
can try a reader’s patience. On the same terms, one might also
question the strategy of citing within the text a tragic anecdote
from London (concerning a Pakistani father who killed his
daughter for a sexual transgression) as the basis for his central
character: ‘Sufiya Zenobia grew out of the corpse of that murdered
girl.’ Rushdie readily confides to us the story of his story:
All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have
been. Anna Muhammad haunts this book; I’ll never write about her
now. And other phantoms are here as well, earlier and now
ectoplasmic images connecting shame and violence. These ghosts,
like Anna, inhabit a country that is entirely unghostly: no spectral
‘Peccavistan’, but Proper London. (S. 116–17)
And predictably enough, two other instances from ‘Proper
London’ follow – instances that might (as in a way they do) find
their way more appropriately into The Satanic Verses. In the later
novel, these fictional frames and postmodern juxtapositioning
serve a larger and wonderfully realized aesthetic purpose. But
the trouble with these passages (and others like them) in Shame
is that the ribs of Rushdie’s intention show too uncomfortably
through the structure. Some critics have tried to defend these
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
discordant elements with the argument that Rushdie is making
a deliberate experiment in Shame with the ‘new journalism’ in
the genre of the non-fiction novel;6 but the elements themselves
remain too oddly assorted, miscellaneous, for the reader to be
quite convinced.
The uncertainty of tone identifiable here is reflected in the
handling of the central narrative, concerning the rivalry of two
dynastic families. Whereas Midnight’s Children had come to life
with the discovery of Saleem’s first-person voice, Rushdie
retreats to the third person in Shame. And he distances himself
still further from the story he has to tell with the framing device
of an observer (or voyeur) through whose perspective, and as it
were involuntary participation, we gain access to the narrative.
This is Omar Khayyam Shakil, the ‘peripheral’ hero of the novel,
whom we meet in the first of the novel’s five sections, entitled
‘Escapes from the Mother Country’ – a phrase which relevantly
runs together allusions to both birth and exile. In his role as
marginal man, voyeur, ‘living at the edge of the world’, Omar is
in some sense a surrogate for Rushdie as author (who has been
described by Homi Bhabha as a writer ‘living at the edge of the
Enlightenment’7); ‘at least he has a vivid imagination’, we are
told, and he reads all the right books (S. 32–3). But Omar is fully
realized as an independent and autonomous character, passive
though he may be, and convincingly projected into the role of the
recognizable Rushdie hero from the bizarre circumstances of his
birth and upbringing. He is the child of three mothers, the
formidable Shakil sisters, whose grasping father has died on the
first page of the novel leaving them in doubtful control of their
decaying fortunes. The shared pregnancy occurs after a
scandalous party, leaving the identity of his mother as well as
his father a mystery. (Rushdie resists allegorical readings, but, if
we were to follow up the Methwold hint from Midnight’s Children,
the father would be the departing Raj and the three mothers
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.) Omar is left free to wander the
ramshackle Shakil mansion, Nishapur, itself a metaphor of postcolonial Pakistan; it is here that he acquaints himself with the long
history of his birthplace, acquiring the essential, identifying
information that Aadam Aziz had gained in the earlier novel from
Tai the boatman: ‘he explored beyond history into what seemed
the positively archaeological antiquity of ‘‘Nishapur’’. . . . On one
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occasion he lost his way completely and ran wildly about like a
time-traveller who has lost his magic capsule and fears he will
never emerge from the disintegrating history of his race’ (S. 31).
There are traces here, too, of Flapping Eagle’s radical disorientation in Grimus.
But Omar’s main role is as vantage point, voyeur: as he
confesses to himself at the end, during a dream of interrogation
in the police cells, ‘I am a peripheral man. . . . Other persons have
been the principal actors in my life-story; Hyder and Harappa,
my leading men. Immigrant and native, Godly and profane,
military and civilian. And several leading ladies. I watched from
the wings, not knowing how to act’ (S. 283). For a moment he
sounds almost like Jane Austen’s Fanny Price paralysed at
Mansfield Park (‘I cannot act’8), the victim of others’ plots and
her own diminished affectivity; and indeed this is his role,
exercising no volition of his own but providing the moral
dimension of other characters’ experience.
The novel really begins (or begins again) with the second
section, ‘The Duellists’, and the formal announcement in the
first paragraph here (which reads like the exordium of an
eighteenth-century novel) of key elements in the plot.
This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia, elder daughter of Raza Hyder
and his wife Bilquis, about what happened between her father and
Chairman Iskander Harappa, formerly Prime Minister, now defunct,
and about her surprising marriage to a certain Omar Khayyam
Shakil, physician, fat man, and for a time the intimate crony of that
same Isky Harappa . . . (S. 59)
The note of detachment, ironic demonstration, could not be
more decisively sounded; and Rushdie is prepared to discharge
the traditional responsibilities of dynastic fiction. We need a
family tree (and the interlaced family tree is duly provided at the
beginning of the novel). We have to be introduced to Sufiya’s
mother, Bilquis, and Bilquis’s father, Mahmoud Kemal, who also
runs an Empire: ‘the Empire Talkies, a fleapit of a picture theatre
in the old quarter of the town.’ The town is Delhi; this is still
India before Independence, and before ‘the famous moth-eaten
partition that chopped up the old country and handed Al-Lah a
few insect-nibbled slices of it’ (S. 60–1). But fathers are quickly
dispatched in this novel, as we have already observed from the
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sudden departure of Mr Shakil – part of Rushdie’s design being
to illustrate the way women are the victims of masculine
ambition, lust, fanaticism, cruelty, and incompetence. And so
Mahmoud is killed by a bomb that destroys his cinema when he
tries to show films that cross the religious divide – ‘even going to
the pictures had become a political act’ (S. 61): a bomb that also
lights a fuse, anticipating the novel’s apocalyptic ending. Bilquis
wanders dazed and naked in the streets, providing one of
Rushdie’s most memorable images of the dislocated and
dispossessed:
O Bilquis. Naked and eyebrowless beneath the golden knight. . . . All
migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into
bundles and boxes – but on the journey something seeps out of the
treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners
fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be
stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers
upon whom they see the rich clothing, the brocades of continuity
and the eyebrows of belonging. (S. 63–4)
Bilquis is rescued by Raza Hyder, and her marriage introduces
her to the dynastic Hyder family, with the bizarre mating rituals
and complex social interaction described in chapter 5, ‘The
Wrong Miracle’; and also to the family stories, ‘because the
stories, such stories, were the glue that held the clan together,
binding the generations in webs of whispered secrets’. It also
projects her into the story, ‘the juiciest and goriest of all the
juicygory sagas’, in which like it or not she has to play her part
(S. 76–7). Bilquis’s part is to give birth to Sufiya Zinobia, herself
the ‘wrong miracle’, in that she is a daughter rather than Raza’s
expected son; and as such she is destined to serve as an image of
Pakistan itself, which has been described a few pages earlier as
‘the miracle that went wrong’ (S. 89, 87). Sufiya’s birth has been
preceded by the symbolic stillbirth of a son, who was strangled
by the umbilical cord in the womb; a son whose ghostly
unhappened life, jointly fantasized by the parents, ironically
suggests an alternative and (who knows) happier history for
Pakistan. The stillborn son may also be seen as part of the system
of imaginative insufficiency alluded to above: the people of new
Pakistan ‘had been given a bad shock by independence, by
being told to think of themselves, as well as the country itself, as
new. Well, their imaginations simply weren’t up to the job.’
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SHAME
‘History was old and rusted’ (S. 81–2), and even Raza Hyder is
unable to move it.
The narrator of Midnight’s Children confessed to a weakness
for symmetry, that obtrusive patterning of events that is
characteristic of the comic vision; and this quality is equally
foregrounded in the black comedy of Shame. Timothy Brennan
draws attention to the no doubt ironic repetition of the mystical
number three in the structure: three mothers, three families,
three countries, three religions, three capitals.9 The ‘duellists’
themselves, Raza and Iskander, are ushered into battle (first,
over a woman) on the same page that sees Bilquis and Rani
consigned to their parallel fates: ‘Meanwhile, two wives are
abandoned in their separate exiles, each with a daughter who
should have been a son’ (S. 104). Iskander’s wife Rani has given
birth to Arjumand, whose fiercely denied femaleness will earn
her the nickname ‘the Virgin Ironpants’. (As we shall see, Rani’s
other function is to weave her allegorical shawls.) Meanwhile,
Sufiya has been stricken with a brain disease that dislocates her
time sense, further underlining her association with a Pakistan
progressively unable (or unwilling) to take its place in history.
Two months after Raza Hyder departed into the wilderness to do
battle with the gas-field dacoits, his only child Sufiya Zinobia
contracted a case of brain fever that turned her into an idiot. . . .
Despairing of military and civilian doctors [Bilquis] turned to a local
Hakim who prepared an expensive liquid distilled from cactus roots,
ivory dust and parrot feathers, which saved the girl’s life but which
(as the medicine man had warned) had the effect of slowing her
down for the rest of her years, because the side-effect of a potion so
filled with the elements of longevity was to retard the progress of
time inside the body of anyone to whom it was given. (S. 100)
Dislocation from historical time features in all Rushdie’s fictions,
from Grimus to The Moor’s Last Sigh, and in each case it is a curse,
an unwelcome distinction that deprives the afflicted person of
the possibility of interacting with others. Here, as later in The
Satanic Verses, it also symbolizes the ideological war on history,
on (Western) time, conducted by militarized Islamic absolutism,
invoking for its own purposes the incontrovertible and claustrophobic simultaneity of the Koran.
In section III (‘Shame, Good News and the Virgin’) the
duellists are brought closer to the crisis of their confrontation.
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
Isky Harappa abandons the hedonistic life he has shared with
Omar Shakil and takes a new mistress, history, as part of a
‘process of remaking himself’ that leads to his becoming Prime
Minister (S. 125, 172); while Raza Hyder frets in his shadow,
conscious of Harappa’s greater political astuteness. But, if the
comic perspective Rushdie imposes on his materials requires
symmetry, symmetry also requires weddings, and the families
are further (dis)united by the failure of the proposed alliance
between Isky’s nephew Haroun Harappa and Ryder’s younger
daughter Naveed – who ditches Haroun in preference for a
polo-playing policeman the day before the ceremony; which is
nevertheless carried out, to everyone’s consternation, with the
substitute groom. This passage (S. 162–72) is one of the comic
triumphs of the novel; including the shocking scene where
Sufiya, overcome by shame, a ‘pouring-in to her too-sensitive
spirit of the great abundance of shame in that tormented tent’,
physically attacks her sister’s new husband, burying her teeth in
his neck. Ryder’s unexpected son-in-law Tulvar Ulhaq does turn
out to have his uses, however, as his magic-realist clairvoyancy
enables him to detect crimes even before they are committed.
Meanwhile the disreputable but indispensable hero Omar has
also ‘fallen for his destiny’ by marrying the afflicted daughter
Sufiya, whom he has treated in his profession as a doctor during
one of her seizures. These take the form of her succumbing (as at
her sister’s wedding) to a ‘plague of shame’, and it is her
embodiment of the moral theme of the novel, the scarcely
translatable sharam, that identifies her as a secular saint. It is this
role that provides the mysterious centre of the novel, her
encounter with evil that leaves the limiting paradigms of the
‘new journalism’ behind. ‘What is a saint?’ the novel asks us,
proposing the answer: ‘A saint is a person who suffers in our
stead’ (S. 141). And even the bemused Raza perceives ‘a kind of
symmetry here’ (S. 161).
The third section concludes with a summary of the action so
far. ‘Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies
inseparable even by death’ (S. 173); the note of tragic fate is
deliberately sounded. But, as is often the case in drama – in
Greek drama, and in Shakespeare – despite the men’s fantastic
political tricks before high heaven it is the female roles that
somehow come to typify this fate. Here, the recurring contrast
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SHAME
between the two Hyder sisters Sufiya and Naveed (‘What
contrasts in these girls!’ (S. 137) ) and the two sequestered wives
Bilquis Hyder and Rani Harappa assumes greater significance.
As Rushdie observes:
I had thought, before l began, that what l had on my hands was an
almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition,
power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to
have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to
demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories, and
comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of
sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted, so to speak,
through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It occurs to me
that the women knew precisely what they were up to – that their
stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. (S. 173)
Not only is this the clearest insight into Rushdie’s handling of
gender politics in the novel;10 the comment is significant, also, as
it reflects on Rushdie’s conscious deployment of different
genres. Does one not catch an echo, in this parodic formal
categorizing, of Polonius’ pedantic recommendation of the
players in Hamlet? If so, it is entirely appropriate, given the
theatrical denouement that is in preparation, with its references
to this play.
The fourth and longest section of Shame (‘In the Fifteenth
Century’, with allusion to the Hegiran calendar) takes us
further into the fantastic politics of this fantasy Pakistan. And
each of its four chapters is fantastic in a different way. The first
(ironically titled ‘Alexander the Great’) provides a deliberately
de-synchronized history of Isky Harappa’s years in power,
partly through low-voltage gossip and media refraction but
mainly through the highly charged and contradictory recollections of his daughter, Arjumand, and his wife Rani – which
show that ‘no two sets of memories ever match, even when their
subject is the same’ (S. 191). Arjumand’s self-imposed function
is to sanctify her father’s memory, ‘to transmute the preserved
fragments of the past into the gold of myth’ (S. 181). But Rani
assumes a more sibylline role. Her eighteen embroidered shawls
are a central metaphor in the novel (and anticipate, incidentally,
the analogous device of Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings in The
Moor’s Last Sigh). Not only do they provide, in four pages (S.
191–5), a terrifying, telescoped account of corruption and
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cruelty, an object lesson in the perversions of power; they also
remind us that it is the female vision that has understood and
registered this. The badminton shawl, the slapping shawl, the
kicking shawl, the hissing shawl; ‘in silver thread she revealed
the arachnid terror of those days’. The torture shawl, the
obliterating white shawl, the swearing shawl; the shawls of
international shame and the election shawls, culminating in the
‘carnage’ of the seventeenth shawl, the shawl of hell, and the
final unsparing shawl depicting the murder of Little Mir
Harappa: ‘she had delineated his body with an accuracy that
stopped the heart.’ It is not only (as the narrator concedes) that
women have taken over the plot; the moral and imaginative
vision of Shame is articulated from a female standpoint. This is
another reason, perhaps, why the awkward formal gestures
referred to earlier seem so inappropriate.
The second chapter returns to Sufiya Zinobia, and her
operations as ‘one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about
whom we are happy to read in stories’ (S. 197). The inventory of
styles is more productive than the abstract gesticulations of
form. Rushdie has confirmed that Stevenson’s paradigmatic Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde lie behind the complementary conceptions
of the doctor Omar Shakil and Raza Hyder; but the beast Hyde
also inhabits the retarded Sufiya, as an image both of her saintly
scapegoat ’shame’ and also the correlative sexual violence in
which it issues. Like other writers who have meditated on the
consequences in daily life of the brutal events and revolutions of
our times (one thinks of the poetry of Tony Harrison, who wrote
The Blasphemers’ Banquet in solidarity with Rushdie in 1989),
Rushdie has made it clear that he sees an intimate connection
between public life and sexual behaviour – especially in the
context of Shame: ‘the book is set in Pakistan and it deals,
centrally, with the way in which the sexual repressions of that
country are connected to the political repressions.’11 There is an
excellent, moving passage in this chapter that presents the
uncomprehending consciousness of an innocent:
There is a thing called the world that makes a hollow noise when you
knock your knuckles on it or sometimes it’s flat and divided up in
books. She knows it is really a picture of a much bigger place called
everywhere but it isn’t a good picture because she can’t see herself in
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it, even with a magnifying glass. She puts a much better world into
her head, she can see everyone she wants to there. . . .There is a thing
that women do at night with their husbands. She does not do it,
Shahbanou does it for her. I hate fish. . . . But she is a wife. She has a
husband. She can’t work this out. The horrible thing and the horrible
not-doing-the-thing. She squeezes her eyelids shut with her fingers
and makes the babies play. There is no ocean but there is a feeling of
sinking. It makes her sick. There is an ocean. She feels its tide. And,
somewhere in its depths, a Beast, stirring. (S. 213–5)
The use of a restricted consciousness for the paradoxical
purpose of clarification is a strategy often used by the postcolonial writer, a technique of altered perspective and estrangement that looks back to Swift. The passage quoted establishes
Sufiya in this role, in that what she cannot work out forces us to
reflect and reconsider our own assumptions about the domestication of the beast. It is followed shortly afterwards by a chilling
account of the sexual murders of four young men, for which the
possessed Sufiya is responsible: ‘the Beast bursting forth to
wreak its havoc on the world’ (S. 219). She too is the reversible
victor/victim: as it were, the lust-crazed Yahoo girl from
Gulliver ’s Travels as well as the flayed woman from the
‘Digression on Madness’ in A Tale of a Tub.12 As the receptacle
of their shame, Sufiya becomes also ‘the collective fantasy of a
stifled people, a dream born of their rage’ (S. 263); she too
carries her dead brother within her, and the lost hope he
represented.
But the preordained plot of history drives the male plot of the
novel, and the chapter on the fall of Harappa at Hyder’s hands
returns us to the problem of the fictional discourse in Shame,
discussed above. On the one hand, we have the powerful image
of Iskander in the death cell, ‘death’s baby’, with the noose
tightening around his neck a clear reference back to his strangled
son: ‘Yes, I am being unmade’ (S. 231). It is the full reversal of the
birth motif in Midnight’s Children; and here the fiction maintains
its own imaginative parabola. But then Rushdie grasps again at
the handrails of history in order to ‘verify’ his story. Of the trial of
Harappa we are told: ‘All this is on the record’, ‘All this is well
known’; baldly, even the proverbial ‘facts are facts’ (S. 228, 231,
233). Even if it could be argued that the last of these asseverations
is ironic, it certainly confuses the reader to have different criteria
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of ‘truth’ applied as it were simultaneously – as if Rushdie were
somehow reinsuring his fiction with documentary evidence.
There is a danger of our finding ourselves in that dubious fictional
space where, as Henry James remarked, details have ceased to be
things of fact and yet not become things of truth.13 This fatal
hesitation also affects the last chapter of section IV (‘Stability’),
which follows the establishment of Hyder’s fundamentalist
power. It begins with a two-page discussion of a performance
in London of Buchner’s play Danton’s Death, and the implications
of the drama for Pakistani politics (S. 240–2). Then there is a
distinctly awkward intervention on the new fundamentalism,
which is introduced with an apology (‘May I interpose a few
words here on the subject of the Islamic revival? It won’t take
long’), and then pursued in an uncompromisingly journalistic
manner: ‘So-called Islamic ‘‘fundamentalism’’ does not spring, in
Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above’ (S.
250–1). Such lapses of judgement recall Timothy Brennan’s not
unreasonable comment, that Rushdie’s journalism lacks the
‘bipartisan’ dimension of his fiction;14 furthermore, the two
categories certainly seem to trip over each other here. Alternative
fictions may happily coexist, but competing truth claims tend to
cancel each other out.
Within this chapter, nevertheless, the novel is concentrating its
imaginative energies in preparation for the fifth and last section
‘Judgment Day’ – which, significantly, allows no authorial
intervention to diffuse the gathering conviction of its climax.
Omar has a vision of the ‘two selves’ of his wife, Sufiya, a familiar
Rushdie trope, and begins to recognize (and to fear) the
‘smouldering fire of the Beast’ which he recognizes in her
(S. 235). When she escapes the confinement of her husband and
father to begin a reign of terror as the white panther, Omar asks
himself whether ‘human beings are capable of discovering their
nobility in their savagery’ (S. 254), and the ghost of Iskander
suggests to him that his daughter has become a natural force,
like a river in flood, that will destroy our human constructions,
whether physical or imaginative: ‘everything yields to its
fury . . . no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her’
(S. 256). It is not surprising that Rushdie has confessed that he
became afraid of his own creation in Sufiya; what she meant, how
she fitted into the accelerating vision of ‘the nature of evil’.15
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SHAME
The last section is played out at this high pitch: back where the
novel began, at Nishapur on the altar of the high hills of the city
of Q, and in sight of the Impossible Mountains. (Responsiveness
to the moral geography of the subcontinent was something
Rushdie learnt from Kipling, and the last stages of the journey of
Kim and his lama are surely not forgotten here.) Judgement is to
fall on Raza Hyder, brought to their house by Omar to be
impaled on the blades of the Shakil sisters’ lethal contraption,
constructed in earlier years – the curiously apposite ‘dumb
waiter’ that works like an Iron Maiden. Raza’s wife, Bilquis, dies
of a fever, and eventually Omar gives himself up, a willing
sacrifice, to the retributive fury of the Beast. But before this
apotheosis it is he who must conduct the epilogue, as he
featured in the prologue to the novel. It is he who negotiates the
dizzying levels of reality that press in at the end, within the old
house that is alternately shrinking and expanding, unsure in his
own fever ‘whether things were happening or not’ (S. 273–5);
there are shades of the Sundarbans here. It is he who is given
access to a vision of the future (as at the end of each cycle of
Shakespeare’s history plays), ‘of what would happen after the
end . . . arrests, retribution, trials, hangings, blood, a new cycle of
shamelessness and shame’ (S. 276–7). And it is Omar who finally
understands and interiorizes this shame, sharing in full
consciousness the symbolic possession of his wife. ‘The Beast
has many faces. It can take any shape it chooses. He felt it crawl
into his belly and begin to feed’ (S. 279). Omar becomes, one
might even suggest, a kind of Hamlet, ‘crawling between heaven
and earth’, consumed by the end with self-disgust at what is
rotten in the state of Peccavistan. This suggestion is reinforced
by Omar’s sense of the ‘gaping mouth of the void’, of the
‘supernatural frontier’ he is approaching (S. 268), and also by his
mothers’ retelling of a shameful family secret, ‘the worst tale in
history’, involving a fratricidal sexual betrayal: ‘this is a family
in which brothers have done the worst of things to brothers’. In
Chunni’s perverse taunt to Omar, concerning his paternity, we
can even hear a clear echo of Hamlet’s reproach to his mother.
Omar is told, ‘Your brother’s father was an archangel. . . . But
you, your maker was a devil out of hell’ (S. 277–8).
On first arriving back at Nishapur Omar perceived that his
mothers had set up what is described as a ‘demented theatre’ for
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the novel’s last scene, and so these dramatic parallels are
perhaps authorized – continuing a pattern of Shakespearian
intertext that becomes a more pronounced feature in Rushdie’s
later novels. The three sisters themselves, called hags and
witches by Raza, are clearly kin to the Weird Sisters, as Raza
himself is a version of the usurping Macbeth. But the last scene
belongs emphatically to fiction, where ‘all the stories ha[ve] to
end together’, since ‘the power of the Beast of shame cannot be
held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood’. And the
stories do end together, after Omar has surrendered to the
terrible, murderous embrace of his inspired wife, in an explosion
that begins in the house, starting a fireball ‘rolling outwards to
the horizon like the sea’, becoming a silent cloud, a cloud ‘in the
shape of a giant, grey, and headless man’ (S. 286): a cloud much
like the apocalyptic nuclear cloud that casts its shadow more
than once in Rushdie’s novels. The rest was silence, for the next
five years at least, while Rushdie was working on his own
explosive device: The Satanic Verses.
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5
The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses is a novel bristling with difficulty. This is due
not so much to the cloud of controversy that has settled over it,
as to the complexity of the novel itself, which makes the most
disinterested reading a challenge. This complexity is no mere
provocative, postmodernist ‘top dressing’ but arises from the
nature and intensity of the metaphysical speculation that lies at
the heart of the work. There is a dense, nuclear fusion of ideas,
grouped around the nature of modern identity, personal and
national/ethnic; the relationship between our instinct for good
and evil; the implications of this for our understanding of
human disposition and potentialities; the nature of the ‘reality’
within which we are required to live out our lives. These ideas
are galvanized by what may even be described as a dangerous
experiment with the limits of imagination, which involves
testing to destruction the coherences we ordinarily rely upon,
via discontinuity, dream, fantasy, and psychosis; and exploring –
by living through it – the nature and authority of ‘inspiration’,
including religious revelation. But let us remember, as Rushdie
himself and some of his more perceptive critics have reminded
us, that despite the seriousness of these preoccupations, we are
dealing with a novel – even, a comic novel – which, while it
engages with other ideological discourses, does so (or at least
attempts to do so) on its own terms. Rushdie presented his own
formal defence in the essay ‘In Good Faith’ (1990: IH 393–414),
and the position outlined here has been supported by many
other novelists and critics.1
One of the difficulties has to do with the extreme formal
complexity generated by Rushdie’s fictional scheme. As he
conceded in a newspaper interview that coincided with the
publication of the novel in September 1988:
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
The Satanic Verses is very big. There are certain kinds of architecture
that are dispensed with. Midnight’s Children had history as a
scaffolding on which to hang the book; this one doesn’t. And since
it’s so much about transformation I wanted to write it in such a way
that the book itself was metamorphosing all the time. Obviously the
danger is that the book falls apart.2
Well: the book has ‘fallen apart’ in one sense, or been torn apart,
dismembered by faction and misrepresentation, from which it
can hardly recover. But Rushdie put his ‘big’ novel together
with ingenuity as well as creative energy. The structure and the
writing of the Verses are as intricate as the conception is complex,
and we should begin by trying to describe how the fiction is
used to articulate and illuminate the governing ideas. Engaging
at the most summary level, we could say that the novel is about
two friends, their intense, often antagonistic relationship with
each other, with their sexual partners, and with the society
around them – which is subjected to radical criticism. In the end,
one of them commits suicide, while the other survives with a
degree of salvaged optimism and a new perspective on love.
This description as it happens also fits Lawrence’s Women in Love
– a novel to which The Satanic Verses does indeed have intriguing
resemblances, not least in the nature of the disintegration
against which the characters are forced to struggle in order to
survive, and the disconcerting ‘doubleness’ and reversibility of
the discourse. But this comparison also highlights the uniqueness of Rushdie’s novel, which, however many allusions,
references, and parallels may be found within it, cannot be
reduced to the sum of its influences. No more than can Joyce’s
Ulysses. These influences include, it must be said, the Bible and
the Koran, the Indian epics, Sufi texts, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, Bulgakov, Beckett – and of course Joyce
himself. Not to mention the cinematic tradition of three
continents, and a representative swathe of contemporary (that
is to say, 1980s) British, Indian, and other cultures. One needs to
‘home in’ on the specificity of Rushdie’s text, and the specific
strategies and solutions he has employed to deliver it.
The two friends, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are
(specifically) Indians; more specifically, they are living (most of
the time) in modern Britain; more specifically still, they are
media people (one in film, one in radio); and most specifically of
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THE SATANIC VERSES
all, they have arrived in Britain as the miraculous survivors of an
Air India jet bombed by terrorists high over London. We are
introduced to them, on the first page, literally ‘flying’ to earth.
This is not realist discourse – though what are later called ‘the
polluted waters of the real’ (SV 309) flow freely enough through
the novel. As in Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, we have
seen ‘something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky’; and the
fiction that follows will more than maintain that extraordinary
trajectory. What happens is that the two ‘fall’ not only literally
into a decaying Britain but also by the novelist’s sleight of hand
into each other; and with the help of his well-practised timetravelling gifts into several parallel narratives: unravelling in
contemporary London, seventh-century Arabia, twentieth-century Pakistan; diversified with excursions to Buenos Aires and
Bombay, memories of the voyages of Vasco da Gama, the
execution of Charles I, and the Battle of Hastings. We learn
through flashback of the film career of Gibreel Farishta (cinema
itself serving again as the modern metamorphic form par
excellence), and the loss of faith that brings ‘a terrible isolation’
upon him; the tragic end of one affair (in the death of Rekha
Merchant) and the beginning of another (with a symbolic
woman mountaineer named Alleluia Cone). Simultaneously –
and simultaneity is one of the novel’s jewelled levers – we are
told of the English education and marriage of Saladin Chamcha,
and his success as a radio ‘voice’: ‘he ruled the airwaves of
Britain’ (SV 60). All this helps him to achieve his denial of
Bombay, represented by his ageing father and his one-time
mistress Zeeny Vakil – who speaks up, appositely enough, in
protest at such perverse ‘purity’, for ‘the eclectic, hybridized
nature of the Indian artistic tradition’ (SV 70).
But, since section II delivers the unsuspecting reader along
with Gibreel himself into the Arabian desert in the seventh
century, we need at this point to address the structure of the
novel, in its nine sections, and Gibreel’s role as ‘time traveller’
(and something more) between them. It has been observed3 that
this novel about disintegration and reintegration is itself divided
via its odd-and-even-numbered sections. The first four of the
‘odd’ sections, I to VII (which take up much the longer part,
some 400 of the novel’s 547 pages), take place in London, while
the last, IX, is set in Bombay. The four ‘even’ sections (each,
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curiously, 38 pages) contain the magical or dream material.
Section II (‘Mahound’) tells the story of the original revelation to
the prophet (including the notorious episode of the ‘satanic
verses’ themselves); section IV, (‘Ayesha’) begins with a brief
encounter with a sinister Imam who resembles Khomeini in
exile, before moving on to the story of the girl Ayesha, who lives
on butterflies and proposes a pilgrimage from Pakistan to Mecca
(simply walking into the sea); section Vl (‘Return to Jahilia’)
relates the story of the establishment of Islam itself, and the
power-broking that goes on in the interests of the ‘Idea’; while
section VIII, (‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’) recapitulates the
outcome of Ayesha’s pilgrimage. The key structural (and
psychological) feature is that it is Gibreel, as archangel –
specifically, angel of the recitation, he who dictates the word
of God to the prophet – who ‘dreams’ the other, magical
narratives. And the handling of the interface between the ‘two’
texts, two levels of reality, is the supreme test of Rushdie’s skill
as a narrator.
These ‘serial dreams’ begin when Gibreel and Saladin are
held hostage in the hijacked aircraft (for a symmetrical 111 days),
‘marooned on a shining runway around which there crashed the
quiet sand-waves of the desert’ (SV 77).
Gibreel was sweating from fear: ‘ . . . every time I go to sleep the
dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the same
place. As if somebody just paused the video while I went out of the
room. Or, or. As if he’s the guy who’s awake and this is the bloody
nightmare. His bloody dream: us. Here. All of it.’ (SV 83)
As if to confirm that reading can be dangerous, these dreams
begin after Gibreel has been reading a creationist pamphlet
given to him by a crank about ‘a supreme entity controlling all
creation’ (SV 81–2). The strategy of the dream is revealed where
Gibreel dreams the Fall (‘Shaitan cast down from the sky’),
dreams dreaming: ‘Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes
aware, without the dream, of himself sleeping, of himself
dreaming his own awareness of his dream’ (SV 91–2). This is
where for him ‘panic begins’, the fear of insanity, as he is forced
to question the ground of his own being; but where for us as
readers the fun begins, the intriguing play of levels, the skilful
and subtle framing of successive fictions within each other.
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But when he has rested he enters a different sort of sleep, a sort of
not-sleep, the condition that he calls his listening, and he feels a
dragging pain in the gut, like something trying to be born, and now
Gibreel, who has been hovering-above-looking-down, feels a confusion, who am I, in these moments it begins to seem that the archangel
is actually inside the prophet, I am the dragging in the gut, I am the
angel being extruded from the sleeper’s navel, I emerge, Gibreel
Farishta, while my other self, Mahound, lies listening, entranced, I
am bound to him, navel by navel, by a shining cord of light, not
possible to say which of us is dreaming the other. We flow in both
directions along the umbilical cord. (SV 110)
There is a dizzying play of fictional perspectives at work here. If
Mahound questions his own identity, referring upwards to
Gibreel; and Gibreel questions his identity, referring upwards to
the author-God, then where exactly are we? If they cannot tell
‘which of us is dreaming the other’, then what is the point of
origin of Rushdie’s fiction? It is not unlike the situation in
Hamlet, where Hamlet (the character in Shakespeare’s play)
challenges the authenticity of the sentiments uttered by the
actor in the play-within-the play – ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he
to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?’4 – when the same
argument applies by domino effect to Hamlet himself. Fiction
collapses into discourse; into what Beckett has most unremittingly analysed as the migrant voice, migrant in an ultimate
sense, that travels with its supply of words through all the
categories of culture: human individuals as well as texts,
documents as well as institutions. Steven Connor has rightly
suggested that ‘the question of identity’ in The Satanic Verses is
‘closely implicated with the possibilities of fiction’,5 and this is
how the imbrication takes place.
We need to be able to ‘ride the thermals’ in this novel, to
respond appropriately to the currents of discourse, the different
registers engaged, the light verbal signals given. And Rushdie is
prepared to provide alternative metaphors for this process of
creation, exchange, interpretation – metaphors often derived (as
in previous novels) from the media. Thus Gibreel’s point of view
is identified as ‘sometimes that of the camera and at other
moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pee oh vee is
always on the move, he hates static shots . . . But as the dream
shifts, it’s always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere
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spectator but the central player, the star’ (SV 108). We recall
what Rushdie said about the form of the novel ‘metamorphosing
all the time’, and here we see exactly what he means. This makes
for demanding reading, but, once the principle of the double
narration has been grasped, it does make sense – and actually
provides some of the novel’s most spectacular imaginative
effects. We become accustomed to being in two places at once;
thus, when in section III Gibreel is held spellbound by Rosa
Diamond’s stories, we are explicitly reminded of his inextricable
involvement with the prophet Mahound (SV 150); when in
section V he endures a week’s tormented sleep in Allie Cone’s
flat, muttering ‘Jahilia, Al-Lat, Hind’, and later sleeptalks in Arabic
(SV 301, 340), he is understood to be labouring at the articulation
of the new religion, the new Idea. When in section VII Gibreel
recites the names of the teenage prostitutes at King’s Cross, the
names are the same as those of the prophet’s wives, usurped by
the prostitutes in Jahilia (SV 460, 382); and when at the end of
this chapter Gibreel calls out the name ‘Mishal’, it is not the
distraught Mishal from the Shaandaar Café he is addressing but
Mirza’s wife Mishal, from the Ayesha story, who is about to be
drowned beneath the waters of the Red Sea (SV 469, 503). There
is even a remarkable paragraph, in the same section [VII], where
Gibreel is identified as passing through no fewer than five
narratives simultaneously:
he understands now something of what omnipresence must be like,
because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a
Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a Gibreel
hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in
secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the
moment at which he will reveal himself, and a Gibreel who feels,
more powerfully every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him
ever closer, leading him towards their final embrace: the subtle,
deceiving adversary, who has taken the face of his friend, of Saladin
his truest friend, in order to lull him into lowering his guard. And
there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to
understand the will of God. (SV 457)
This is a triumph of narrative art, and one that even goes a trick
or two, in the treatment of narrative time, beyond Sterne.6 But
the novel is not simply a postmodern puzzle for the reader to
solve, although there are enough clues to keep the curious
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reader happy: in the numerological references (666 the Number
of the Beast, 420 a section in the Indian criminal code), and
reversible dates such as 1961 that read the same upside down –
as (apparently) turning a watch upside down in Bombay will
give you the time in London. Then there are the self-descriptive
names (Alleluia Cone, Jumpy Joshi) and indeed the whole
system of doubled names (Hind/Hind, Mishal/Mishal), that link
the levels of the plot; and indicate an indebtedness to both Joyce
and Freud.7
We may now return from the structure to consider the line of
the narrative itself (what is actually witnessed and recorded by
this flexible point of view); and then on, as it were out at the
other side, to reconsider Rushdie’s articulation of his themes. As
will have become clear by now, it is no simple matter to do even
this, since the ‘waking’ narrative of the odd-numbered chapters
likewise has its fissures and gaps, its equivocations and aporias.
Not only does Gibreel live between two worlds, fearing the
‘leakage’ of one into the other, but Saladin also inhabits an
unstable universe, by contagion – both as the satanic half of
Gibreel’s angel (‘the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha,
condemned to their endless but also ending angeldevilish fall’
(SV 5) ), forced to share and replicate some of Gibreel’s dreams
and visions – and also – in his ‘own’ person – as the
metamorphosed victim of a racist society. Section III has
delivered the reborn pair into the care of Rosa Diamond, a
mysterious woman with a memory as archaic as that of Tai the
boatman,8 and an equally seductive gift for magic-realist
narrative. (Critics who have objected to this passage as selfindulgent or superfluous seem not to appreciate its importance
in establishing the protocol of the ‘hinged’ narrative, the
jewelled lever of simultaneity referred to earlier.) But only
Gibreel is exposed to this, Rosa’s stories ‘winding round him like
a web’ (SV 146), since Chamcha has meanwhile been arrested by
the police as an illegal immigrant – Gibreel’s evasion of this
treatment, partly because of the appearance of a halo which
confounds the law, making him a ‘traitor’ in Chamcha’s eyes.
The supernatural level of the narrative reasserts itself as
Chamcha gradually turns into a goat, complete with horns,
hooves, and tail. The allusion to Lucian’s metamorphic Golden
Ass (its author later identified as colonial subject of an earlier
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empire (SV 243) ), foregrounds the real, social significance of this
transformation: ‘they have the power of description’ (explains a
friendly manticore), ‘and we succumb to the pictures they
construct’ (SV 168). And it is in this disadvantaged condition
that Saladin sees ‘his’ Britain with new eyes: including his wife,
Pamela, who, believing him dead, has started an affair with his
old friend Jumpy Joshi. She dreams of him confiding in her his
new vision of terminal decline: ‘ ‘‘Things are ending,’’ he told
her. ‘‘This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been
quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the
glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until
night falls’’ ’ (SV 184). Meanwhile Gibreel has also made his way
(with his halo) to ‘Ellowen Deeowen’ London, pursued by ‘the
fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by
driving him insane’, by ‘the terror of losing his mind to a
paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed
existed, of turning in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical
archangel’ (SV 189). He is pursued also by the ghost of Rekha
Merchant, who transforms ‘Proper London’ into ‘that most
protean and chameleon of cities’, the underground into a
‘subterranean world’ out of Virgil or Dante ‘in which the laws of
time and space had ceased to operate’, into a ‘hellish maze’, a
‘labyrinth without a solution’ where he must continue his ‘epic
flight’; and where he is rescued by the reappearance of Allie
Cone (SV 201).
Section V (‘A City Visible but Unseen’) is the longest in the
novel. It is divided into two chapters, each subdivided into some
twenty shorter sections. This episodic structure helps to achieve
the effect of dislocation intended here – rather like the
‘Wandering Rocks’ section in Ulysses. The first chapter follows
Saladin through Thatcher’s Britain. These pages (SV 243–94) are
the satirical centre of the novel, switching between passages of
low realist description and high cultural analysis. The low
realism is associated with the Shaandaar Café, where the
transformed Chamcha takes refuge, with its improbable proprietor Mr Sufyan, his unforgiving wife Hind (a crossover
name), and two teenage daughters, Mishal and Anahita, who
are living London to the full. The ‘high culture’ is represented
by Mimi Mamoulian and her playboy friend, Billy Battuta, and
the grotesque Hal Valance, whose energetic exploitation of
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‘adland’ draws on Rushdie’s own experience of that world. Mimi
is well able to defend her jingles against Chamcha’s analysis: ‘I
am an intelligent female. I have read Finnegans Wake and am
conversant with post-modernist critiques of the West, e.g. that
we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a ‘‘flattened’’
world. When I become the voice of a bubble bath, I am entering
Flatland knowingly . . . ’. It is Hal who refers to ‘Mrs Torture’, and
understands the kind of newness she wants to bring into the
world: ‘In with the hungry guys with the wrong education. New
professors, new painters, the lot. It’s a bloody revolution.
Newness coming into this country that’s stuffed full of fucking
old corpses’ (SV 261, 270). The Hot Wax nightclub, with its
subversive ‘meltdown’ ritual of wax effigies, floats somewhere
between the two categories as it awaits the fire that will conclude
this section; as does Jumpy’s jealous critique of Hanif Johnson,
right-on lover of the tempting Mishal. ‘Hanif was in perfect
control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic,
black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power. . . . But . . . his envy of Hanif was as
much as anything rooted in the other’s greater control of the
languages of desire.’ This makes him painfully aware that
‘language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak
it, and by doing so to make it true’. At the same time, Jumpy has a
more profound perception which is more to do with language as
consciousness than language as power. ‘The real language problem:
how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its
poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all
that you haven’t got a clue’ (SV 281). At the end of this chapter,
Saladin is returned to human shape, partly ‘by the fearsome
concentration of his hate’ for Gibreel, who now haunts his
dreams; as Saladin will symmetrically appear ‘on the screen of
[Gibreel’s] mind’ at the end of the next (SV 294, 355).
The sixty pages of section V.2 are the most complex and
therefore the most tightly organized in the novel. Allie Cone’s
father provides a prelude, the ‘short story’ of his life featuring
like the interpolated tale in an eighteenth-century novel. Born a
Jew in Poland, he has (like Grimus) experienced the extreme
horrors of the camps, and denied his past in order to survive: ‘he
wanted to wipe the slate clean’; ‘ ‘‘l am English now’’ he would
say proudly in his thick East-European accent’ (SV 297–8). As
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such he is one of the spokesmen for the discontinuous,
disintegrative spirit in the novel. For him, ‘this most beautiful
and most evil of planets’ is beyond redemption, beyond
understanding: ‘The world is incompatible . . . Ghosts, Nazis,
saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness,
while down the road, the inferno’ (SV 295). And T. S. Eliot’s
‘unreal city’ from The Waste Land is the most visible aspect of this;
for him ’the modern city . . . is the locus classicus of incompatible
realities’ (SV 314). But his philosophy does not save him: ‘Otto
Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft
and died’ (SV 298). (It is possible that Rushdie may have been
thinking here of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, who committed
suicide in 1987.) The rest of the chapter follows Gibreel’s own
fight against disintegration and the will-to-suicide, alongside an
Allie Cone who has had to fight her battles too. She tells Gibreel
that she went up the mountain ‘to escape good and evil . . . because that’s where all the truth went’, deserting the cities where
it is ‘all made up, a lie’. She is fearful especially of love, ‘that
archetypal, capitalized djinn’, and ‘the blurring of the boundaries
of the self’ (SV 314). But Gibreel’s jealousy breaks first, blurring
other, more catastrophic boundaries: ‘the boundaries of the earth
broke . . . and as the spirits of the world of dreams flooded through
the breach into the universe of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta saw
God’ (SV 318).
In the extraordinarily risky, exposed, and comic passage that
follows we perceive that the ‘God’ Gibreel sees is none other
than the ‘myopic scrivener’ Salman Rushdie himself: ‘the
apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and
wore glasses.’ More vulnerable than the John Fowles who puts
in an appearance in his own The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
Rushdie offers himself as a ‘hinge’ here. It is as if the actor
playing Hamlet (to return to the example suggested above)
should arraign Shakespeare on stage: who is this guy responsible for so much commotion? Why doesn’t he leave us in peace?
(And indeed the exhausted Gibreel has protested earlier in just
such terms: ‘If I was God I’d cut the imagination right out of
people and then maybe poor bastards like me could get a good
night’s rest’ (SV 122).) But the author-God invoked here will not
answer the ultimate question: ‘Whether We be multiform,
plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay, or whether We be pure, stark,
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extreme, will not be resolved here’ (SV 319). If God exists, he is
the supreme equivocator. Gibreel leaves the relative security of
Allie’s flat for a renewed assault by a London that has ‘grown
unstable once again’. There is no defence now from vision
(‘When you looked through an angel’s eyes you saw essences
instead of surfaces’), no hiding from the angel’s memory of the
Fall, no choice in the simple alternative: ‘the infernal love of the
daughters of men, or the celestial adoration of God’ (SV 320–1).
The comic mode reasserts itself as Blake’s prophetic ‘map’ of
London is replaced with the humble A to Z. With this Gibreel
sets out to save the city from itself (‘the atlas in his pocket was
his master plan’), but he finds that ‘the city in its corruption
refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers’ (SV
326–7) – as is proved by his farcical attempt to intervene in a
lovers’ quarrel at the Angel tube station.
The ghost of Rekha Merchant appears to read Gibreel a lecture
on comparative religion. The ‘separation of functions, light versus
dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam’,
she observes, but Deuteronomy provides a more archaic and
possibly truer formulation: ’I form the light, and create darkness; I
make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things’ (SV
323). The fundamental principle of equivocation, reversible
values, and significances is never far from the surface. But
Gibreel is by this time too far gone in schizophrenia to take heed,
and the precise moment of his splitting into two is presented as a
cultural phenomenon, via Beckett and Stevenson. ‘He had begun
to characterize his ‘‘possessed’’, ‘‘angel’’ self as another person: in
the Beckettian formula, Not I. He. His very own Mr Hyde’ (SV
340). The media world returns as the stammering film-maker
Sisodia proposes that Gabriel should make a comeback in a
‘theological’, playing none other than the Angel Gibreel – the
argument being that if, for once, ‘those stories were clearly placed
in the artificial, fabricated world of the cinema, it ought to
become easier for Gibreel to see them as fantasies, too’ (SV 347).
But Rushdie’s design requires that the experiment fails, precipitating Gibreel instead over the edge into psychosis. The sure
sign of this is that he sees the split as occurring ‘not in him, but in
the universe’; there are now ‘two realities, this world and another
that was also right there, visible but unseen’. This decomposed
vision makes everything simple:
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No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these BiblicalSatanic confusions! . . . Forget those son-of-the-morning fictions . . . How much more straightforward this version was! How much
more practical, down-to-earth, comprehensible! – Iblis/Shaitan
standing for the darkness, Gibreel for the light. – Out, out with
these sentimentalities: joining, locking together, love. Seek and destroy:
that was all. (SV 351–3)
The last of the London sections, ‘The Angel Azraeel’, brings all
these tensions to fulfilment – and provocatively poses the formal
problem at the same time. ‘What follows is tragedy’: or, since
tragedy is ‘unavailable to modern men and women’, at least a
‘burlesque for our degraded, imitative times’. But no formal
inflection can avoid the underlying question: ‘which is, the
nature of evil, how it’s born, why it grows, how it takes
unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul’ (SV 424). ‘It
all boiled down to love’, reflects Saladin at the beginning, and he
tries to implant this principle, celebrating ‘the protean, inexhaustible culture of the English-speaking peoples’, and even the ‘faded
splendours’ of London itself. ‘Resurrection it was then’, he
concludes, ‘roll back that boulder from the cave’s dark mouth’ (SV
397–401). Even overexposure to the ‘fast-forward’ culture of TV
and the scavenging tabloids brings him the image of a grafted
tree that reminds him of (and redeems) a tree cut down in anger
in his father’s garden. But Saladin too is assailed at this point
with ‘double vision, seeming to look into two worlds at once’,
when he sees/feels Gibreel bearing down on him, ‘the icy shadow
of a pair of gigantic wings’ (SV 416). The media party at
Shepperton Studios (a brilliant ten-page set-piece: SV 411–21)
brings the two into collision. Saladin becomes Iago to Gibreel’s
Othello, with Allie Cone the innocent victim of his customized
‘satanic verses’ recited over the telephone; provoking Gibreel to
seek vengeance – armed, appropriately enough for this black
comedy of communications, with a trumpet rather than a sword.
The crisis of the London plot involves a racially motivated
murder enquiry, with a media essay on what the TV camera sees
– and (like Lear’s ‘scurvy politician’) does not see, including a
police cover up that involves the deaths of both Pamela and
Jumpy Joshi and their unborn child. London disintegrates in
Gibreel’s vision into its destructive elements, its competing
cultural descriptions: ‘This is no Proper London: not this
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improper city. Airstrip One, Mahogonny, Alphaville. He
wanders through a confusion of languages. Babel . . . ‘‘The gate
of God.’’ Babylondon’ (SV 459). The novel veers at this point
(deliberately, confusingly) between the low mimetic of ‘derelict
kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken doors,
dolls’ legs, vegetable refuse’, the moralization of these details in
‘shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions,
expended angers, accumulated bitterness, and a rusting bath’,
and Blakeian vision, where a ‘rotting pile of envy’ blossoms into
bushes on the concrete, ‘needing neither combustible materials
nor roots’, creating an ‘impenetrable . . . garden of dense intertwined chimeras’, like ‘the thornwood that sprang up around
the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago’
(SV 461–2). These formal strands are woven together in the
burning of the Shaandaar Café, where Gibreel spontaneously
rescues Saladin – his evil adversary: ‘the fire parting before them
like the red sea it has become’ (SV 468) – the scene also weaving
together Rushdie’s two fictional worlds, as Ayesha and her
pilgrims set out on their journey.
There is less need to comment in detail on the visionary
sections, partly because the narrative substance has already been
placed within the overall structure and partly because much of
the criticism of the novel has focused almost exclusively on this
aspect. (Steven Connor has justly remarked that the emphasis on
imagined Islam has tended to ‘ship the novel safely abroad’, away
from its intended audience.9 ) But a brief consideration of the
principal elements will help to clarify Rushdie’s overall design. It
is in section II that we are brought closest to the moment of
revelation itself (SV 112), and the true terror of uncertainty as to
the origin of the ‘voice’. (Srinivas Aravamudan’s essay offers the
best commentary on this passage and its implications.10) It is here,
also, that Mahound is tempted (like Christ in the wilderness) by
the ‘satanic verses’ that would compromise Islam into recognizing the three goddesses Al-Lat, Manat, and Uzza as ‘worthy of
devotion’: verses that he first accepts – in the wake of his
uncertainty – and then rejects, partly prompted by Hind, who
warns him that ‘between Allah and the Three there can be no
peace’ (SV 121). But the unidentified voice has the last unsettling
word: ‘it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me. From my
mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and
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converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all
know how my mouth got worked’ (SV 123).
Or perhaps we do not. The closest we get to interrogating the
voice is in section IV, where Gibreel turns on his tormentor/
narrator and tries to ask the fundamental question: where do
the words come from? They are ‘not his; never his original
material. Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling
them to move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease? He can’t
work it out’ (SV 234). Some critics have argued that we are
meant to understand the devil to be the under-narrator of The
Satanic Verses.11 And we do need to keep in mind the epigraph
Rushdie puts to the novel, taken from Defoe’s History of the Devil.
This presents as it were a curriculum vitae for the fallen angel,
which at least allows his nomination for the post.
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled
condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in
consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid
waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he
is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of
his foot upon.
There is also, I suggest, in Rushdie’s textual self-interrogation, a
reference to Hughes’s bird-devil from Crow, who according to
the Manichaean myth refashioned by Hughes takes over the
work of creation when God falls asleep; and Crow’s vision is
God’s nightmare, as Gibreel’s visions may plausibly be. But it
would be false, reductive, to seek to ground a reading of The
Satanic Verses in exclusively theological terms. The devil we may
meet in Rushdie is Blake’s devil, or Bulgakov’s; and the voice is
ultimately Beckett’s voice, the furthest we can go in reaching
back for the origins of consciousness, the grounding of being in
the ‘unformulable groping of the mind’,12 the grammatical
fiction attached to one pronoun or another. The voice finds a
different route in section VI, associated as it is here with the
satirist Baal who has parodied the sacred revelation, and who
claims (blasphemously but scrupulously), ‘I recognize no
jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen
Muses’ – that is, the twelve favoured prostitutes in the brothel.
The reward of his honesty is execution by Mahound: ’Writers
and whores. I see no difference here’ (SV 391–2). Each of the
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seven scenes or sequences in this section is introduced with the
phrase ‘Gibreel dreamed . . . ’, floating the narrative off into its
ambiguous space. And the last is the dream of the death of
Mahound himself, to be lamented by Ayesha with her
unambiguous faith. ‘But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: ‘‘If
there be any here who worshipped the Messenger, let them
grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any here who
worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive’’ ’ (SV
394). The significance of the ‘Untime of the Imam’ was briefly
considered in Chapter 1. The story of Ayesha dramatizes the
clash between philosophies of time, in that her faith and visions
stand outside time – as the banyan tree with its half-mile span is
a magical space under which her village nestles. She is unmoved
by Mirza Saeed’s protest that ‘this is the modern world’ (SV 232),
and leads the villagers off on their pilgrimage – including
Mirza’s wife, Mishal, who has been converted. Section VIII
follows the fortunes of the pilgrimage, tacking between two
worlds, to the moment when the pilgrims walk into the sea and
disappear. We should pay careful attention to the last two pages
of this section (SV 505–7) – the sequel to the ‘failed’ pilgrimage,
as the sceptical Mirza, whose wife has been drowned along with
the others, comes to terms with his experience. He alone among
the survivors claims not to have seen the parting of the Arabian
Sea: ‘My wife has drowned. Don’t come hammering with your
questions.’ He goes home to Peristan, where the great tree
under which Ayesha preached her pilgrimage is dead, ‘or close
to death’, the fields ‘barren as the desert’, and the gardens ‘in
which, long ago, he first saw a beautiful young girl, had long ago
yellowed into ugliness’. He takes to his rocking chair and
prepares for death. Then on ‘the last night of his life’ he realizes
that the tree is burning: ‘He saw the tree explode into a
thousand fragments, and the trunk crack, like a heart.’ He
himself falls in ‘the withered dust’, but as he does so he feels
something brushing his lips and sees ‘the little cluster of
butterflies struggling to enter his mouth’ – butterflies, the
symbols of resurrection that have fed and clothed Ayesha from
her first appearance.
Then the sea poured over him, and he was in the water beside
Ayesha, who had stepped miraculously out of his wife’s body . . . ‘Open,’ she was crying. ‘Open wide!’ Tentacles of light were flowing
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from her navel and he chopped at them, chopped, using the side of
his hand. ‘Open,’ she screamed. ‘You’ve come this far, now do the
rest.’
He does the rest: ‘His body split open from his adam’s-apple to
his groin’ (exactly the image Allie Cone had used, we recall, to
express her fear of love: the fear of being opened ‘from your
adam’s apple to your crotch’ (SV 314) ), ‘so that she could reach
deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at
the moment of their opening the waters parted, and they walked
to Mecca across the bed of the Arabian Sea’. It is an
extraordinary, concentrated image of birth, death, and resurrection, with the fact of human love and sexuality as the hinge that
attaches us to these ultimate things – things that we can never
‘understand’, but only perceive as mysteries. And it is to
religion, revelation, as well as to art, that we may look for a
witness to their significance. The reader who has come so far
may well wonder that the charge of blasphemy should be laid
against such writing, and might rather share the view put
cogently by Fawzia Afzal-Khan:
the point of view that emerges is not anti-Islam but anti-closure,
opposed, in principle, to any dualistic, fixed way of looking at things.
Framed in this way, Rushdie’s impulse towards blasphemy becomes
really an impulse towards regeneration: renewal born of a destruction of old, fixed ways of seeing and understanding.13
How to come down from such exaltation to the ubiquitous ‘real
world’? Joyce manages this with the switch from the epiphanies
to sombre realism in the Portrait; and Rushdie does it here to
provide his own real-world conclusion. We switch from London
– and from the Arabian Sea – to Bombay, eighteen months later,
where both Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha have
separately returned. Gibreel has come back to resume his film
career, Saladin to be with his dying father; in fact, to ‘fall in love
with [his] father’ again, and to recover ‘many old, rejected
selves’ (SV 523). Then Allie Cone arrives en route for a
mountaineering expedition, and Saladin becomes uneasy. He
has a strange sense of being haunted, again; a feeling that ‘the
shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world,
that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream’ (SV
540). Allie dies in a fall from Gibreel’s apartment, just as Rekha
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Merchant had done. Gibreel arrives at Chamcha’s house in a
distracted state to tell his story – which begins with a familiar
formula: ‘Kan ma kan / Fi qadim azzaman . . . It was so it was not
in a time long forgot’ (SV 544), the take-it-and-leave-it palinode
on which all story floats – whether as enchanted sea or miasmal
ocean. The substance of Gibreel’s ravings is a series of snatches
from earlier in the novel, including of course Saladin’s own
obscene ‘satanic verses’ multi-voiced over the telephone that
drove him out of his mind. In the logic of the novel, one of them
has to die; and it is Gibreel who pulls a pistol from the magic
lamp and puts it in his mouth. All that is left is for Saladin to
look out, from this side, at the Arabian Sea, on which the full
moon makes a pathway ‘like a parting in the water’s shining
hair, like a road to miraculous lands’. His own story, however,
needs no miracle. His father is dead; but his woman, Zeeny
Vakil, is at his elbow: ‘he was getting another chance.’ And, as in
Joyce’s last novel, The Satanic Verses then puts its own tail in its
mouth: ‘If the old refused to die, the new could not be born’ (SV
546–7).
The Satanic Verses is a big novel in every sense: geographically
(it has been called ‘a tale of three cities’), temporally (ranging
from the seventh century to the twentieth), philosophically (the
sophisticated but unaffected engagement with an encyclopaedia
of ideas), culturally (in the different traditions with which it
interacts), linguistically (there are six languages used in its
composition). But it is as an exploration of the alternatives of
faith and doubt that it has made the greatest impact – if these are
actually alternatives. St Augustine said, credo quia impossible est: I
believe because it is impossible to believe. This is the Augustine
whose Confessions are one of the permanent tributaries of fiction;
who is acknowledged as one of the architects of modern
consciousness. And perhaps we should understand Rushdie’s
troublesome novel (like Henry II ’s troublesome priest, Thomas
Becket, prime mover of another pilgrimage) as a pilgrimage into
the imagination in search of the source of religious feeling –
however ambivalent its findings are. From first page to last, this
is its true trajectory. No novel so obsessed by the temptation of
faith can be judged as ‘blasphemous’. The only worlds that are
seriously called into question in Rushdie’s fiction are the
flattened, value-free world of contemporary culture, wherever
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this may be found in its various conditions of exhaustion; and
also the world of terror, whether this serves a secular ideology or
whether (as often) it conceals itself behind a religious imagination that has been perverted and usurped in the pursuit of
political power.
APPENDIX: THE RUSHDIE AFFAIR
Occasional reference only has been made in this study to the
wider political response to The Satanic Verses, as this has
intersected with legitimate criticism of the novel. But the wider
response is also part of the story, and I will attempt to provide
here an outline of the complicated events and issues that have
become known as the Rushdie Affair. (For references and further
reading, see the relevant section of the Select Bibliography.)
The Satanic Verses was published in London by Viking on 26
September 1988. There were immediate protests in India against
what was understood from reports (and from an interview with
Rushdie published in India Today on 15 September under the
heading ‘My Theme is Fanaticism’) to be a work that offered
insult to Islam, and the novel was banned in India in October.
Bans followed in South Africa (October), Bangladesh and Sudan
(November), Sri Lanka (December), and Pakistan (February
1989); very soon it was proscribed throughout the Islamic world.
In the UK an Action Committee on Islamic Affairs was founded
to mobilize public opinion against the novel; there was a protest
rally in London, followed by demonstrations in other British
cities. On 14 January a copy of The Satanic Verses was burnt on
the streets of Bradford, attracting widespread media attention.
On 12 February six people were killed during anti-Rushdie riots
in Islamabad. The climax to the protests occurred on 14 February
1989, when the Ayatollah Homeini of Iran (whose period in exile
during the reign of the Shah is referred to in the novel: see pp.
205–15) issued a fatwa or religious edict, sentencing Salman
Rushdie to death for blasphemy, under Islamic law; enjoining
Muslims everywhere to carry out the sentence, offering the
double incentive of martyrdom and a large material reward.
With little choice, Rushdie accepted the offer of police
protection, and went into hiding. Homeini himself died four
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months later, but hardliners seized on this fact to insist that the
fatwa was irreversible; and indeed it was reiterated at intervals
from Tehran. For ten years, until the peacemaking statement by
the Iranian Government in September 1998, Salman Rushdie
remained a fugitive from an archaic system of arbitrary punishment; a situation which, as he conceded during that time, seemed
uncannily to have entangled him in his own fictions: ‘It is hard to
express how it feels to have attempted to portray an objective
reality and then to have become its subject’ (IH 404).14
The Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie and his
Publishers was set up one week after the fatwa, to organize
resistance, and has maintained a detailed chronology of events
from ‘Day 1’, published under the title ‘Fiction, fact and the fatwa’
in The Rushdie Letters (1993).15 Here are listed the most significant
events: including, alarmingly, the violence. The six deaths in
Islamabad, already mentioned; the deaths of twelve Muslim
rioters, shot by police in Bombay on 24 February 1989; the death
of a security guard, killed in a bomb attack on the British Council
library in Karachi four days later; another death and more injuries
as a result of confrontations in Dhaka and Kharachi in March.
Later the same month, two Muslim leaders who had spoken in
Rushdie’s defence are shot and killed in Belgium. Naguib
Mahfouz receives death threats; there are attacks on bookshops
in England and abroad. Two years on, on 3 July 1991, the Italian
translator of The Satanic Verses, Ettore Capriolo, is stabbed by an
Iranian in Milan. A week later, the Japanese translator Hitoshi
Igarashi is stabbed to death in Tokyo. There is no let-up. In
September 1993 the Norwegian publisher of the novel, Wilhelm
Nygaard, is shot and severely wounded.
Despite this terroristic atmosphere – indeed, fuelled by a
general revulsion at the idea of a death sentence being passed
on a British citizen, as it were urbi et orbi, by a foreign power –
there is a growing platform of support. First official support,
from the UK Government, the governments of all the EC
countries, the UN, and UNESCO, whose Director-General,
Federico Mayor, identifies ‘a sense of loss whenever the human
imagination is condemned to silence’. The American Senate
passes a resolution condemning the threats against Rushdie,
and there are statements of support from other American
sources. Sir Sridath Ramphal, Secretary-General of the
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Commonwealth Secretariat, reminds Iran of the boundaries of
diplomatic behaviour: ‘Even countries that have banned the
book’s publication draw the line at incitement to the author’s
assassination.’ European writers, journals, newspapers, keep the
matter in the forefront of debate; France is especially active.
Wole Soyinka defends ‘the creative world’ against censorship; it
has ‘the will and the resources and the imagination’ to resist.
Developing out of an ICA conference in London in March, The
Rushdie File is published in September; this catalogues worldwide support for Rushdie and his novel from writers and
intellectuals – though not without some questioning and some
dissenting voices. On the first anniversary of the fatwa, Harold
Pinter reads Rushdie’s lecture ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ to the ICA in
London. On 30 September 1990 Rushdie is interviewed by
Melvyn Bragg on BBC Television’s prime-time South Bank Show.
On ‘Day 1,000’, American PEN organizes a demonstration in
New York. On the third anniversary, Rushdie makes an
appearance at an event in London hosted by the Friends of
Salman Rushdie, attended by Günther Grass, Tom Stoppard,
and Martin Amis, with videoed statements from Edward Said,
Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott.
One of the most problematic episodes was Rushdie’s decision,
in December 1990, to ‘embrace Islam’ – announced in an article
in The Times on 28 December. Here he professed ‘an intellectual
understanding of religion’, and offered some concessions
(including the suspension of plans for a paperback edition of
his novel). This decision had been taken on the advice of Islamic
scholars who had suggested such a move might defuse the
international tension. But no such reciprocation occurred (as the
July 1991 attacks illustrated), and Rushdie was forced to realize
he had made a mistake – incurring criticism on both sides.
Almost inevitably, he had to renege on this ‘conversion’, which
he did in an address at Colombia University on 12 December
1991, concluding with the defiant assertion: ‘Free speech is life
itself.’16 The much-disputed paperback edition was eventually
published (by an anonymous ‘Consortium’) on 24 March 1992.
Inevitably, discussion of the Rushdie Affair over the last ten
years has provided the opportunity for much airing of prejudice,
self-righteous moralizing, and even the settling of personal
scores; which are no doubt best ignored. But some arguments
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need to be rehearsed. One thinks particularly of the attitude of
those who, focusing on that part of the novel (the larger part) set
in Britain, questioned the right of an immigrant author like
Rushdie to criticize his adopted society in such uncompromising terms. This parallels the doubts expressed earlier by some
critics as to his legitimacy as a commentator on those societies
(India and Pakistan) he had left behind – doubts that have been
considered in earlier chapters of this study. Both arguments are
based upon the mistaken, mechanical assumption that a writer
must be a paid-up member of a religion, group, or nation –
complicit, accommodated – in order to earn the right to testify.
Such an idea, one reflects, would disqualify many other
twentieth-century writers: Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence (abroad),
Hemingway, Orwell (in Spain), Kundera (in France), and so on.
In fact, almost the opposite of this defensive reflex is true.
Paradoxically perhaps, betrayal (in the conventional sense – that
is, the exposure of one’s own inherited pieties to criticism, even
to ridicule) is almost a writer’s duty. As Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus
puts it: ‘You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall
try to fly by those nets.’17
The more significant debate has focused on the issue of free
speech. Rushdie has declared himself a free-speech absolutist,
and this is consistent with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion
and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’
But, as has been pointed out, this article is always quoted,
misleadingly, out of any relevant context (even without the
qualifying Article 20 that follows). Simon Lee has argued in The
Cost of Free Speech, a book prompted by the Rushdie Affair
among other issues, that the free-speech argument is usually
mishandled by those who are unwilling to ponder its real
complexities and contradictions – which are not helped by
imprecise and inconsistent provisions in law. (‘The law . . . has
been exposed as hopelessly confused by the Rushdie affair.’)18
This relates especially to the present law of blasphemy in
Britain, which only protects the Christian religion – a reasonable
cause for grievance in the Muslim community. (A private
prosecution of the novel was rejected on precisely these grounds
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in March 1989.19) This is a theme also of Richard Webster’s A
Brief History of Blasphemy, subtitled Liberalism, Censorship, and ‘The
Satanic Verses’.20 It is significant that both Lee and Webster are
consistently critical of the one-sided way in which the freespeech issue has been used by Rushdie’s supporters, to the
disadvantage of minority groups.
But the law can only try to create the level playing field; it
cannot dictate the rules of the game. The problem remains the
cultural one of mutual incomprehension. Lee suggests that the
‘final lesson of the Rushdie affair for our debate on free speech
is that it is bound up in our understanding of the differences
between various modes of discourse’.21 Religious, cultural, and
political discourses simply do not interface in the global village.
Rhetoric and realpolitik – or fiction and fact; imagination and
material conditions – are programmed for conflict on a whole
range of issues.22 And so, whereas Rushdie and his supporters
(of whom I count myself one) have the right and duty to argue
their case, this must include a recognition that the very terms of
the argument will make their conclusions unacceptable, even
incomprehensible, to others.
Which brings us back to blasphemy: one of those archaic,
untranslatable words. The perception of blasphemy arises at the
fault-lines of discourse, where one system of values and beliefs
conflicts with another outside the tolerance levels normally
observed. (Malise Ruthven alludes in his sympathetic study of
the case to ‘the gulf between Islamic and Christian values’.23)
Reading The Satanic Verses on its own terms, as I have tried to do
in the foregoing chapter, it is hard to understand the grounds
for real offence. But, like the retina, the imagination itself has its
blind spots. Trying to compensate for these, it should not be
impossible to understand how a different structure of consciousness might find such a radical exercise in scepticism as the novel
conducts to be intolerable, even repugnant. Ruthven identifies
‘religious doubt’ as ‘the central condition of modernity’;24 it
should be no surprise that many will resist the condition. The
communications problem is real, and must be admitted as such;
there may be good faith (as well as the other kind) on both sides
of the question. But what cannot be admitted, ever, as a
consequence of this, is the right of anyone to short-circuit the
argument by threatening the life of an antagonist. In an
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observation cited by Lee, a Supreme Court judge argued in a
censorship case from 1927 that ‘the remedy to be applied is more
speech, not enforced silence’.25 More speech, more evidence,
more argument, more criticism; more activity, that is to say, in
what Rushdie has called ‘the arena of discourse . . .where the
struggle of languages can be acted out’ (IH 427).
Now that the Iranian Government has dissociated itself from
the infamous fatwa, we can hope not only that Salman Rushdie
may be returned to his life, but that the novel at the epicentre of
the Affair may be returned to this arena of discourse.26
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6
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
and East, West
HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES
Like many a fairy tale, Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
explores complex moral and philosophical questions in a simple
way: via the elementary emblematic of narrative. The misfortunes
of Haroun’s father, Rashid, who loses his storytelling gift when
challenged by literal questions, and the adventures of Haroun
himself among mythological beasts, evil demons, supernatural
seas, and magical landscapes, are a fictive reflection of real
problems in the real world. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
novel may be read at one level as a coded account of Rushdie’s
personal predicament after the fatwa – a reading encouraged by
the acrostic reference to his son Zafar that appears as dedication:
Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu,
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you.
Rushdie told James Fenton, in interview, that he had promised
his son ‘the next book I wrote would be one he might enjoy
reading’.l The details of the coded reading may easily be
sketched out: the separation of the family, the attack on free
speech (‘the greatest Power of all ’ (HSS 119) ) by Khattam-Shud,
the embodiment of silence and negation; the sinister power of
Bezaban, the idol of black ice. A glossary lists names that ‘have
been derived from Hindustani words’, and Bezaban is given as
‘Without-a-Tongue’ (HSS 217). But obviously this reading, while
legitimate (even inevitable), risks being reductive.2 Haroun is also
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a story about story itself, about the need and the capacity of
human beings to communicate with each other, across time and
across cultures – and despite whatever other obstacles may be
put in their way. In this respect, Haroun may also be compared
with Gulliver’s Travels, a fiction which is both available to a
contextualized, ‘local’ decoding in terms of eighteenth-century
political personalities and events but also floats free of this
encumbrance on a sea of its own, a mythical, magical, and
dehistoricized account of human behaviour that retains nevertheless an important moral dimension.
It will be interesting, therefore, to consider how Haroun offers
its own simplified version of Rushdie’s recurrent themes. To
begin with, the novel provides us with an elementary theory of
narrative, communicated in terms of the central metaphor of the
‘sea of stories’. This sea is located, we discover, on the invisible,
elliptical moon Kahani, the orbit of the imagination (the word
simply means ‘story’), and is fed by a wellspring that constitutes
a powerfully positive image: ‘a huge underwater fountain of
shining white light’ (HSS 167). This fountain has immediate
analogies in the romantic imagery of Blake and Coleridge (who
is quoted in the text); but there are more archaic sources, first in
the Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara or ‘ocean of the stream of stories’
referred to in Midnight’s Children and then to Ganga, the queen
among rivers, in the Ramayana, which is invoked for its healing
properties by Ansurmat near the beginning of the poem. This
magical sea is the source of all story, as Haroun’s father assures
him, introducing his son to the metaphor that will be literalized
in the narrative that follows. Sailing on the sea later, Haroun is
able to observe for himself its emblematic qualities:
He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand
thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different
colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of
breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the
Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and
contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained
different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told
and many that were still in the process of being invented could be
found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest
library in the universe. (HSS 72)
The beauty of stories is that they are (like water itself) recyclable.
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As his guide Iff the Water-Genie tells Haroun – in what is a very
creditable version of the origins of narrative, and a good
summary of what Rushdie has argued in discursive contexts
elsewhere – ‘Nothing comes from nothing . . . no story comes from
nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new
combinations that make them new.’ And it is the success of
Rushdie’s recycling that it can retain fidelity to its ancient sources,
the pristine quality, while at the same time incorporating
contemporary references: as here, to Borges’s story ‘The Library
of Babel’.3 In answer to Haroun’s question about turbulence, Butt
the Hoopoe contributes his own narratological formula: ‘Any
story that is worth its salt can handle a little shaking up’ (HSS 86,
79); and it is up to the Floating Gardeners (one of the more
delightful inventions in the book) to ensure that the strands do
not get too tangled. These principles are enough to justify the
wholesale recasting of ‘half-familiar stories’ by the entertaining
(and, as it turns out, cross-dressed) page-boy Blabbermouth.4
However, the sea of stories and its subscribers, professional
storytellers like Rashid, have more to worry about than
turbulence. There is a plot abroad systematically to poison the
sea, and even to plug the wellspring itself. The author of this
plot is the sinister Khattam-Shud, introduced as ‘the ArchEnemy of all Stories, even of Language itself . . . the Prince of
Silence and the Foe of Speech’, and later revealed to be none
other than the Cultmaster himself, high priest of the idol
Bezaban (HSS 39, 101). He is the principle of negation,
announcing that ‘for every story there is an anti-story’: ‘There he
sits at the heart of darkness . . . and he eats light, eats it raw with
his bare hands’ (HSS 160, 145). Khattam-Shud’s hostility to
stories is for reasons that would be described in the real world as
ideological – as he explains in response to Haroun’s question as
to why he hates stories so much, since for him they are ‘fun’:
‘The world, however, is not for Fun,’ Khattam-Shud replied. ‘The
world is for Controlling.’
‘Which world?’ Haroun made himself ask.
‘Your world, my world, all worlds,’ came the reply. ‘They are all
there to be Ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream
in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at
all. And that is the reason why.’ (HSS 161)
Rushdie’s metaphor lends itself to ecological elaboration, as
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with Haroun’s analysis of the polluted waters around KhattamShud’s shadow-ship, the huge black ‘ark’ (like a rogue oil tanker)
that actually manufactures poison:
The thick, dark poison was everywhere now, obliterating the colours
of the Streams of Story, which Haroun could no longer tell apart. A
cold, clammy feeling rose up from the water, which was near
freezing point, ‘as cold as death’, Haroun found himself thinking.
Iff’s grief began to overflow. ‘It’s our own fault,’ he wept. ‘We are the
Guardians of the Ocean, and we didn’t guard it. Look at the Ocean,
look at it! The oldest stories ever made, and look at them now. We let
them rot, we abandoned them, long before this poisoning. We lost
touch with our beginnings, with our roots, our Wellspring, our
Source . . . .’ (HSS 146)
They are alerted to this situation by Haroun’s nightmare, a
perverted version of ‘Princess Rescue Story Number S/1001/
ZHT/420/41(r)xi’, which he endures after drinking polluted
water from the sea. ‘ ‘‘It’s pollution,’’ said the Water-Genie
gravely. ‘‘Don’t you understand? Something, or somebody, has
been putting filth into the Ocean. And obviously if filth gets into
the stories, they go wrong’’ ’ (HSS 73–5).
The celebratory and confirmatory tone of Haroun requires that
Khattam-Shud should ultimately be perceived as a comic
grotesque, a pantomime figure. This outcome is cleverly plotted,
in that he is identified at the end with the contemptible clerk Mr
Sengupta, whose distinguishing feature is that he has ‘no
imagination at all’, whose mean-minded literalism temporarily
disrupts the happy Khalifa family, but who is finally sent
packing: ‘What a skinny, scrawny, snivelling, drivelling, mingy,
stingy, measly, weaselly clerk! As far as I’m concerned he’s
finished with, done for, gone for good’ (HSS 210). However, he
does also function as a potent reminder of real evil in the real
world, the kind of fanaticism that begins in division and ends in
cruelty and terror. It is in the principle of division itself, the
rigorous and destructive separating out of what should be
complementary qualities, that Rushdie locates the real ‘poison’,
here as elsewhere in his fiction. At one point Haroun observes
the warrior Mudra ‘fighting against his own shadow’, a memorable
image of disintegration, the negation of the true multidimensionality of experience – variously realized here in terms
of bright versus dark, warm versus freezing, sociability, chatter,
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and noise versus isolation, silence, and shadow. ‘It was a war
between Love (of the Ocean, or the Princess) and Death (which
was what the Cultmaster Khattam-Shud had in mind for the
Ocean, and for the Princess, too).’ Mudra explains that KhattamShud has taken this division to its extreme: ‘he has separated
himself from his Shadow!’, and can therefore be in two places at
once’ (HSS 123, 125, 133). This is a more concrete example of the
schizoid metaphysics of Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses,
who comes to believe (we may recall) that good and evil are not
compounded together but entirely separate, the fruit of ‘two
different trees’.
But Haroun’s reflections take him beyond this bifurcated
image to a vision of reintegration which is again consistent with
Rushdie’s own mature thinking on the subject.
‘But it’s not as simple as that,’ he told himself, because the dance of
the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and
beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action
could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be
as lovely as the children of the light. ‘If Guppees and Chupwalas
didn’t hate each other so,’ he thought, ’they might actually find each
other pretty interesting. Opposites attract, as they say.’ (HSS 125)
And this is exactly what is allowed to happen at the end. When
the sun rises for the first time over Gup City, it destroys the
‘super-computers and gigantic gyroscopes that had controlled
the behaviour of the Moon, in order to preserve the Eternal
Daylight and the Perpetual Darkness and the Twilight Strip in
between’; Kahani becomes ‘a sensible Moon . . . with sensible
days and nights’ (HSS 172, 176). And, when ‘Peace [breaks] out’,
it is marked by a series of reunions – of Night and Day, Speech
and Silence, which ‘would no longer be separated into Zones by
Twilight Strips and Walls of Force’; and of course, by the reunion
of the Khalifa family itself (HSS 191, 210).
The question that destabilized the ‘happy beginning’ of
Haroun was Mr Sengupta’s querulous complaint, ‘What’s the use
of stories that aren’t even true?’: which is first swallowed by
Soraya, Rashid’s wife, and then fatally repeated to Rashid by his
son Haroun. Haroun cannot ‘get the terrible question out of his
head’, and is perplexed by his own reflections on truth and lies:
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Nobody ever believed anything a politico said, even though they
pretended as hard as they could that they were telling the truth. (In
fact, this was how everyone knew they were lying.) But everyone
had complete faith in Rashid, because he always admitted that
everything he told them was completely untrue and made up out of
his own head. (HSS 20)
The trouble is that Rashid loses faith in himself. One of Haroun’s
favourites among his father’s stories is that of Moody Land: ‘the
story of a magical country that changed constantly, according to
the moods of its inhabitants. In Moody Land, the sun would
shine all night if there were enough joyful people around . . . when people got angry the ground would shake; and when
people were muddled or uncertain about things the Moody Land
got confused as well.’ Moody Land sounds like the natural
habitat of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, whereby we project our
emotions onto our environment. But in the chill mist of the
Dull Lake, Rashid is suddenly made to see it as fallacious. ‘ ‘‘The
Moody Land was only a story, Haroun,’’ Rashid replied. ‘‘Here
we’re somewhere real.’’ When Haroun heard his father say only
a story, he understood that the Shah of Blah was very depressed
indeed, because only deep despair could have made him say
such a terrible thing’. (HSS 48).
Rushdie’s own fairy tale provides, in its own terms, an answer
to Mr Sengupta’s blank, banal, and reductive question. The
answer is that truth and falsehood, reality and fiction – ‘the
Frontiers of Height and Depth,’ as Swift has it – ‘border upon
each other’,5 and cannot be simply lined up in opposition like
the black and white pieces on a chessboard – the chessboard, we
may remember, that is rejected as too simple a metaphor for
human experience in Midnight’s Children; and that turns up
again here in Haroun’s polluted dream.6 The positive and
optimistic formula that first enables Haroun to take issue with
his father’s depression, and his capitulation to the ‘real world’ of
the Dull Lake, is what the reader carries back from Kahani, as
Haroun himself brings back as talisman the model of his magical
bird: ‘the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could
easily be real’ (HSS 50). Which takes us, via the Land of Oz, to
Rushdie’s collection of short stories.
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EAST, WEST
Of the nine stories included in the collection East, West, the first
six had been published previously in a number of different
journals (the earliest in 1981). One can hardly expect the same
degree of coherence from this collection, therefore, as from a
novel – even a Rushdie novel. But the arrangement of the stories
into three groups of three – East; West; and East, West (the three
unpublished stories) – addresses directly the facts (and fictions)
of cultural difference, misunderstanding, and antagonism; and
it is under this aspect that the stories will first be considered
here.7 The title is one half of an English proverbial saying – ‘East,
West, Home’s Best’ – on which this collection (indeed, a good
part of Rushdie’s work) is an ironic commentary. The proverb
itself can be interpreted in at least two ways: ‘whether you travel
to the east or the west, home (back in England) is best’: this is the
nineteenth-century imperialist xenophobic reading. Or (the
twentieth-century post-colonial, culturally pluralist reading):
‘whether you live in the east or the west, your home there is the
best place to be.’ But there is a third reading – we might I
suppose call this the postmodern or post-fatwah version – which
is articulated by Rushdie at the end of his booklet on the film The
Wizard of Oz (written for the British Film Institute in 1992).
Rushdie loves the film but hates the ending, where Dorothy
accepts the Good Witch Glinda’s suggestion that ‘there’s no
place like home’:
How does it come about, at the close of this radical and enabling
film . . . that we are given this conservative little homily? Are we to
believe that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that
she didn’t need to make such a journey in the first place? Must we
accept that she now accepts the limitations of her home life, and
agrees that the things she doesn’t have there are no loss to her? ‘Is
that right?’ Well, excuse me, Glinda, but is it hell.
Rushdie offers us, in his conclusion, his own ‘little homily’
instead, premised on the interesting fact that, in the sixth of the
thirteen Oz books that Frank Baum wrote following the success
of the Wizard, Dorothy actually goes back to Oz with Auntie Em
and Uncle Henry and becomes a princess (as all little girls
should, given the right circumstances).
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So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual
world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left
our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed
only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret
of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’, but rather
that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for
the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which
is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we
began. (WO 56–7)
The themes of homelessness and making a home are explored in
East, West in several different ways. First through the number of
‘displaced persons’, otherwise migrants, who actually feature in
the stories. Everybody seems to live anywhere else except where
they were born. Indians and Pakistanis are self-exiled in
London; alongside them is a retired Grand Master from
Hungary. ‘Exiles, displaced persons of all sorts, even homeless
tramps have turned up for a glimpse of the impossible’ in ‘At
the Auction of the Ruby Slippers’. Nor is this exclusively a
contemporary experience; in the third of the ‘West’ stories, for
example, Columbus languishes in exile at the court of Queen
Isabella of Spain, her ‘invisible man‘, the exotic foreigner who
lends her court ’a certain cosmopolitan tone’; meanwhile he has to
console himself with those dreams and ‘possibilities’ that only
‘the harsh . . . ties of history’ will eventually cause to materialize
(EW 107–19). The migrants’ difficulty with language itself
underlines this alienation – a feature which is strongly marked
in the last group of three stories, ‘East, West’, where cultures
blend and clash. In ‘The Courter ’, the ayah is known as
‘Certainly-Mary’ and her Hungarian admirer as ‘Mixed-Up’ for
precisely this reason; they are adrift in a tongue foreign to both
of them. Though this does have its advantages:
English was hard for Certainly-Mary, and this was a part of what
drew damaged old Mixed-Up towards her. The letter p was a
particular problem, often turning into an f or a c; when she
proceeded through the lobby with a wheeled wicker shopping
basket, she would say, ‘Going shocking,’ and when, on her return, he
offered to help lift the basket up the front ghats, she would answer,
‘Yes, fleas.’ (EW 176)
It is by this logic that the porter becomes the courter, and their
relationship is adventitiously defined. The narrator’s more
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shadowy father has his own problems, too; on one occasion he is
slapped by an assistant in a chemist’s shop when he asks for
‘nipples’ rather than teats (EW 176, 184). The characters in
‘Chekov and Zulu’ have come by their nicknames likewise
through an accident of language, mishearing the name ‘Sulu’
from Star Trek; not even from Star Trek direct, but from the series
recycled on the radio from ‘cheap paperback novelizations’: ‘No
TV to see it on, you see. The whole thing was just a legend
wafting its way from the US and UK to our lovely hill-station of
Dehra Dun’ (EW 165). The conversation in Zulu’s house in
Wembley is hardly North London patois, either. But despite
these displacements, in only one story does anyone actually
follow Dorothy and go back home. This consolation is reserved
for the 70-year-old ayah we have met as Certainly-Mary, whose
life has been used up anyway in service abroad. And even here,
the ‘culturally plural’ narrator (who has just been issued with
his British passport) undercuts her decision, by refusing to
choose between the cultural offerings available.
the passport did, in many ways, set me free. It allowed me to come
and go, to make choices that were not the ones my father would
have wished. But I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to
this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses
tightening, commanding, choose, choose.
I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose
between you, Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do
you hear? I refuse to choose. (EW 211)
The cultural question remains unanswered – on what is,
significantly enough, the last page of the last story, with the
strands left deliberately untied.
A second theme that unites these stories is that developed in
Chapter 1 of this study, and conveniently summarized in
Rushdie’s critique of Oz: how ‘the imagined world [becomes]
the actual world’, how the self is constructed out of the
confrontation with circumstance. Six of the stories will furnish
examples here – often, as we shall see, of relative failure in the
task of self-making. Ramani the rickshaw-wallah in ‘Free Radio’
has ‘the rare quality of total belief in his dreams’, but this only
makes him vulnerable to the persuasion of the ‘thief’s widow’
he lives with (another fictional embodiment of Mrs Gandhi) to
accept the free radio in exchange for his right of reproduction.
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As the narrator tells him, ‘My idiot child, you have let that
woman deprive you of your manhood! ’ Ramani never even gets
his radio, but goes to Bombay, from where he writes letters full
of fantasy about a new career in the movies, persisting with ‘the
huge mad energy which he had poured into the act of conjuring
reality’, and with which he has conspired (ironically) to cheat
himself of his own future (EW 19–32). ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ is
another fiction about how fiction – this time, in the form of
superstitious belief – can ravage ordinary human life. The
circumstances surrounding the theft, finding, and restealing of a
relic destroy a merchant’s family: in a single catastrophic
paragraph, he stabs his daughter (by mistake) and falls on his
sword in remorse, for his wife to be ‘driven mad by the general
carnage’ and committed to an asylum. But the relic is returned
and authenticated: ‘It sits to this day in a closely guarded vault
by the shores of the loveliest of lakes in the heart of the valley
which was once closer than any other place on earth to Paradise’
(EW 55–7). The discrepancy between the untroubled, pellucid
prose in which this story is narrated (suggested by the phrase
that describes the family before their misadventure, enjoying a
‘life of porcelain delicacy and alabaster sensibilities’) and the
savagery of its subject matter makes its own formal comment.
The best-known story in the collection, ‘At the Auction of the
Ruby Slippers’, is especially interesting in this connection
because it derives from a real circumstance and then spirals
off to make its point about imaginative excess. The real
circumstance was the auction by MGM in May 1990 of the ruby
slippers worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz film. The
slippers went, Rushdie tells us, for ‘the amazing sum of $15,000.
The buyer was, and has remained, anonymous. Who was it who
wished so profoundly to possess, perhaps even to wear,
Dorothy’s magic shoes? Was it, dear reader, you? Was it I?’
(WO 46). The question generates the story (first printed along
with Rushdie’s essay), which explores the permeable boundaries
between fact and fantasy, desire and its fulfilment. Among the
people coming to bid for the slippers are fictional characters:
from paintings, novels, and other films, all seeking to make their
bids for power – or is it immortality?
This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the
moral decay of our post-millennial culture. Heroes step down off
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cinema screens and marry members of the audience. Will there be
no end to it? Should there be more rigorous controls? Is the State
employing insufficient violence? We debate such questions often.
There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free,
unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged
reality, whose resources diminish day by day. After all, few of us
would choose to travel in the opposite direction (though there are
persuasive reports of an increase in such migrations latterly). (EW
94–5)8
The slippers are magical currency; they can provide access to
everything, the fulfillment of all our wishes and dreams. The
narrator is bidding for the slippers himself; he wants their power
to win a woman’s love. But, as the tension mounts in the
saleroom, and the bids themselves spiral away from reality, the
narrator is suddenly overtaken by another power: the detachment of pure contemplation, the ‘lightness of being’ characteristic of fiction itself. ‘There is a loss of gravity, a reduction in
weight, a floating in the capsule of the struggle. The ultimate
goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own
survival become – yes! – fictions. And fictions, as I have come
close to suggesting before, are dangerous.’ Dangerous because
they may persuade us to accept the ‘damaged reality’ described
above, or even contribute to it in ways that are suggested in the
next paragraph.
In fiction’s grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to
have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean, we
may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a
distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go. Like
men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow to rest. (EW 102)
This story fulfils, therefore, some of the anxieties about fiction
expressed in the essays, how TV and the cinema may impair
rather than enhance our sense of reality, how books themselves,
and theatre, may distract us with false – which in the order of art
means inadequately imagined – ideologies.
There is another health warning against fiction in the first
story in the final group, ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ – a story
whose aptly named suicide hero Eliot Crane is a cousin-german
of Gibreel Farishta. Crane is a cut-down Faust figure whose
‘immersion in the dark arts was more than scholarly’:
‘Pentangles, illuminati, Maharishi, Gandalf: necromancy was
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part of the zeitgeist, the private language of the counter-culture.’
He has met a demon. The impressionable Indian narrator Khan
has been initiated by him: ‘I was taught the verses that conjured
up the Devil, Shaitan, and how to draw the shape that would
keep the Beast 666 confined.’ An immigrant at Cambridge, Khan
believes Eliot can help him relocate and reinvent himself.
in Eliot’s enormous, generously shared mental storehouse of the
varieties of ‘forbidden knowledge’ I thought I’d found another way
of making a bridge between here-and-there, between my two
othernesses, my double unbelonging. In that world of magic and
power there seemed to exist the kind of fusion of world-views,
European Amerindian Oriental Levantine, in which I desperately
wanted to believe.
But Eliot turns out to be a paranoid schizophrenic, slave not
master: ‘He couldn’t help anyone, the poor sap; couldn’t even
save himself. In the end his demons came for him’, and he blows
his brains out (EW 125–46). The two Indian diplomats in ‘Chekov
and Zulu’ likewise never manage to disentangle the reality of
their own lives as husbands and fathers from the fiction among
which they grew up: the misapplied names from Star Trek are an
index of a more profound (and yes: dangerous) misapprehension.
It is an ironic comment on the mediatization of experience that,
when he is fated to be in Rajiv Gandhi’s entourage at the moment
of his assassination, Chekov steps into eternity aboard Captain
Kirk’s spacecraft: ‘The scene around him vanished, dissolving in a
pool of light, and was replaced by the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise’ (EW 170). It is just another episode: a ‘virtual’ death
rather than a real one. Finally, in the last and longest story, ‘The
Courter’, for all the imaginative defences that may be set up, the
real world reasserts itself unambiguously. The young Indian
narrator grows up in recognizable London, but still at one remove
from social reality not only because of the language barrier (that
affects his family rather than himself) but once again because of
the mediatized world he constructs for himself, composed of pop
songs, hair styles, fashion, and The Flintstones. But history 1960s
style irrupts into this story more decisively, with the assassination
of Kennedy and the race-hate speeches of Enoch Powell on
television (‘a vulpine Englishman with a thin moustache and mad
eyes’), and finally the racial attack on his mother and sister that
comes like an awakening slap from the outside world.
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Fictions are dangerous. It is as if the regenerative sea of Haroun
has degenerated here to the ‘miasmal ocean’ referred to in the
‘Ruby Slippers’; as if Khattam-Shud has had his way after all,
and poisoned the Sea of Stories. And, if the inference to be
drawn from the stories in East, West is, therefore, in some
respects a negative one, then this may have something to do
with the form of the short story itself, which is perhaps not the
most congenial means of expression for Rushdie. It does not
allow sufficient room for his ideas to stretch and develop, for the
tentacular connections to establish themselves. Walter Benjamin
remarked that the short story is alien to the oral tradition in that
it does not allow ‘that slow piling one on top of the other of thin,
transparent layers’, which image, he suggests, provides ‘the
most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect
narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of
retellings’.9 Rushdie has himself observed that, if he has written
relatively few short stories, this is because the material that
might make a story tends to get swallowed up in the larger
system of the novels, which he sees as ‘everything books’ made
up of ‘a jostle of stories’; ‘and so there’s nothing left over for
short stories’.10 And perhaps this is as it should be – as one last
instance might confirm. In ‘Yorick’, a Shakespearean variation
which is generally felt to be one of the less successful stories in
the collection, the narrator breaks off at one point to remark, ‘it’s
true my history differs from Master CHACKPAW’s . . . so let the
versions of the story co-exist, for there’s no need to choose’ (EW
81). The point is, the writer of short stories has to choose, given
the constraints of the form. Is this not a case of the novel-asgenie struggling to get out of the short-story-as-bottle? Out into
the wider world where faith, hope, and fiction may carry us
through; and the greatest of these may after all turn out to be
fiction. Which is a possible reading of Rushdie’s next novel.
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7
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Rushdie’s first big novel since The Satanic Verses, seven years on,
was awaited with cautious expectation. His readers had willed
Rushdie to carry on writing, to triumph over the adversity of his
circumstances, but at the same time there was some doubt
expressed as to whether he could possibly recapture the
imaginative liberty of his earlier work. And in the event The
Moor’s Last Sigh was published to sympathetic rather than
enthusiastic reviews.1 In the first book to include a section on
the novel, Catherine Cundy offers what is (she concedes) a
‘largely negative assessment’. The novel has been marked, she
feels, by the fact of Rushdie’s incarceration, and breathes a
stifled, exhausted air as a result; it is in her view ‘strangely flat –
with the two-dimensionality of a largely cerebral reconstitution
of ‘‘reality’’ ’.2 (What work of art, one reflects, is not ‘cerebral’?)
But it may be that there is something preconditioned about
these judgements, as if the novel could not possibly be allowed
to succeed, whatever its qualities, since that would somehow
contradict the comfortable, common-sense idea we have of the
continuity between the writer and the work. (One might note in
passing that Cundy’s book frequently invokes biographical
‘facts’ to underpin critical judgements.) It should be possible to
respond to the novel on its own terms, without such a reflex. It is
an assumption of the present account that Rushdie was able to
draw on all his resources as a writer for The Moor’s Last Sigh; and
the argument, that, though it is deliberately refracted through
the mirror of art, the novel is as ambitious, as demanding, and as
fine as anything he has previously written.
One should first note the continuities with Rushdie’s earlier
work. The Moor’s Last Sigh returns to India, but to a different
India from that of Midnight’s Children (or The Satanic Verses). This
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is Spanish/Portuguese India, with a different colonial history;
the echoes here are not of The East lndia Company, Amritsar,
Mountbatten, and the Raj, but of Vasco da Gama, the Alhambra,
and multicultural Goa with its Jewish and Christian communities. The title alludes to El ultimo suspiro del Moro, a hill in
southern Spain so named because it was the place from which
Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Granada, looked back at the
city before going into exile in Africa; while two paintings
contend for the same title within the novel as well, reflecting
Rushdie’s obsession with the idea of the palimpsest, the work of
art that overlays another. From Cochin we move to Bombay,
which takes over as the city centre of the novel; and, after the
Indian plot has run its course, we end up back in southern
Spain, as if by a process of imaginative restitution, or recentring;
like the rebalancing of a wheel. The novel is once again a family
saga, the story this time of the doomed Zogoiby family. As with
Shame, the text is once again prefaced with a family tree. It is a
story of sexual infatuation and betrayal; of conquest, trade, and
political intrigue; of religion and religious conflict; of generosity
and understanding deformed by intolerance; of spiritual values
corrupted by commerce. A story, significantly, that creates
within itself (like a pearl) the opaque metaphor of its own
making. J. M. Coetzee’s review perceptively identifies the
specialized figure of ekphrasis as central to Rushdie’s project:
‘the conduct of narrative through the description of imaginary
works of art.’3 The function of Rani Harappa’s eighteen shawls
from Shame, reflecting the history of her husband and her times,
is fulfilled here by the paintings of Aurora Zogoiby, Moor’s
mother, which represent not only the micro-narrative of her
family within the macro-narrative of her Indian world, but also
the narrative of representation itself – the different styles and
genres of painting that an evolving consciousness will come to
utilize. And it is not only these paintings that operate in this
way. There is a series of ancient blue tiles in the synagogue
tended by Moor’s Jewish grandmother, ‘metamorphic tiles’
which themselves have narrative and prophetic qualities. ‘Some
said that if you explored for long enough you’d find your own
story in one of the blue-and-white squares, because the pictures
on the tiles could change, were changing, generation by
generation, to tell the story of the Cochin Jews’ (MLS 75–6). It
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is a novel, finally, that explores (with all the courage of selfinterrogation – a process that has, no doubt, been matured by
Rushdie’s predicament) the ambivalence of our values in all
these interlocking spheres.
The first-person narrative by the main character, Moraes
Zogioby, known as ‘Moor’, is itself (as we would expect)
foregrounded in its technique. The ‘last sigh’ of the title implies
the first cry at birth, Beckett’s vagitus, as well as the expiration. ‘I
am what breathes. I am what began long ago with an exhaled
cry, what will conclude when a glass held to my lips remains
clear.’ It is also the breath with which we articulate words. ‘A
sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out
meaning. While we can’ (MLS 53–4).4 A natural storyteller, Moor
as it were breathes narrative. But his story is actually written
under compulsion. The ‘story of [his] story’, as Henry James
puts it,5 is that at the last stage of his life, in Spain, Moor is
imprisoned by the demented painter Vasco Miranda, one of his
mother’s former lovers and a jealous rival in art, who forces him
to write his narrative. ‘Every day . . . he brought me pencil and
paper. He had made a Scheherazade of me. As long as my tale
held his interest he would let me live’ (MLS 421). A graphological
Scheherazade, one should add, according to the Beckettian
model: Molloy is provided with paper for the same purpose
by ‘this man who . . . gives me money and takes away the pages’.6
And so Moor recreates in his cell the complex story of his family.
He is the fourth child (and only son) of a prosperous mixed
family from Cochin in (then) Portuguese Goa. The genetic
admixture is important: Moor describes himself as ‘a high-born
cross-breed‘, ‘a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a
mongrel cur . . . a real Bombay mix’. ‘Bastard’, he concludes; ‘I like
the sound of the word’ (MLS 5, 104). The family fortune derives
on the side of his mother, Aurora da Gama, a Christian, from
generations in the spice trade; and on the side of his Jewish
father, Abraham Zogoiby, from the illicit sequestration and
secret sale of jewels housed in the blue-tiled synagogue. These
jewels derive ultimately from Boabdil, king of Granada, who
had given them to his Jewish mistress, from whom they have
passed down through the Zogoiby family. It is the sale of these
jewels that saves the firm from bankruptcy when it is threatened
by destructive family feuding and the blockade during the
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Second World War; but the jewels are handed over by
Abraham’s mother only at a price. Rumpelstiltskin’s price: the
life of Abraham’s first son, which is therefore surrendered to an
intertextual bargain before he is born. The conduct of trade
(which may be taken to include this sinister fairy-tale contract) is
a major preoccupation in the novel, and the progressive
compromises from the vision and energy of the early traders
from Vasco da Gama onwards to the corrupt practices of
Abraham Zogoiby himself – which eventually involve moneylaundering, drugs, prostitution, and arms dealing – are part of
the overall theme of degeneration and betrayal.
Moor is born in 1957, and his narrative takes us up to 1993, as
he prepares for death: literally lying out on his tombstone,
having nailed the sheets of his stolen narrative to doors and
gateposts after his escape from Miranda’s madhouse, in an
allusion to the publication of Martin Luther’s testament. What
associates him with the authentic family tree of Rushdie’s
fictional creations is that he is cursed to be a ‘magic child, a timetraveller’ (MLS 219), who grows and ages at exactly twice the
normal speed. Thus he is born only four-and-a-half months after
conception (though Rushdie also teases us, as elsewhere, with
alternative parental possibilities), and his personal narrative of
thirty-six years delivers him up a saddened and wizened
septuagenarian. Moor learns about the earlier events in his
dynastic story through oral tradition: by listening to the stories
of his family and their friends and servants. His parents
themselves, his three sisters (Ina, Minnie, and Mynah: to
prepare for Moor), his uncle Aires and aunt Carmen, his
mother’s lover Vasco Miranda, and the one-legged servant
Lambajan, all piece together the earlier episodes. And there is, of
course, the privileged evidence of his mother’s paintings, which
provide a commentary on important events in the narrative –
and have a further significance for the theory of representation,
to which we shall return. Inevitably, for a trading family, the
family fortunes are closely involved with public events. The
novel includes episodes from the First and Second World Wars,
from the political unrest in India during the 1930s, and later in
the narrative we encounter again events that featured in
Midnight’s Children: the tempestuous time of independence
itself, partition, the language riots, Mrs Gandhi’s infamous
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emergency. But, although the Zogoiby family is therefore
‘handcuffed to history’ in a similar way to Saleem, and although
Rushdie occasionally uses the same devices to achieve the
parallelism (thus one of Moor’s sisters dies in the Bhopal
disaster, and when Sanjay Gandhi is killed in a plane crash
Moor tells us ‘I, too, was plunged towards catastrophe’ (MLS
274–6)), the historical details are sketched in much more
incidentally here than in the earlier novel: history is not used
as ‘scaffolding’ in the same way.7 In Midnight’s Children there
was a genuine effect of ’split screen’ or double focus, whereas in
The Moor’s Last Sigh Moor’s own story and the technique of his
telling of it retain our attention much more continuously. The
background is a more resonant one, composed of fairytale and
folktale, epic and myth; literature and art and philosophy as
well as history. It is ‘an Indian yarn’ (MLS 87), and Rushdie
expects us to make all the formal concessions implied here. Once
again, in the syncretist spirit, there are significant Shakespearian
intertexts in the novel, this time mainly The Merchant of Venice
and Othello. And, like the latter play, the novel is much more
domestic in focus than any of Rushdie’s earlier works. It is this
intimacy that generates an intensity of emotion that is also,
perhaps, uncharacteristic. Elsewhere in Rushdie the macronarrative tends to put personal feeling into perspective, but here
it is personal feeling that establishes the perspective according to
which other things are judged.8
At the tormented centre of this personal feeling is Moor
himself, the ‘magic child’ who has been singled out for
spectacular disappointments in life: a series of exemplary
betrayals that explain the regular references to himself as a
Christ figure (he presents his story as a crucifixion from the first
page). The first betrayal might be seen as that of nature itself, in
his handicap, because not only is he condemned by his
abnormal growth-rate to be a ‘time-traveller’ – which is as bad
for living, as it is good for storytelling – but he is also born with a
deformed left hand: fingers webbed and bunched into an ugly
fist that serves him well in his days with Mainduck’s thugs in the
Bombay underworld. The next betrayal is that by his ‘one true
love’, Uma Sarasvati, an enigmatic figure who first reciprocates
Moor’s love and then betrays him: to his friends, and ultimately
to his parents. The final and most painful betrayal is that by his
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parents themselves, who disavow him as a result of Uma’s
destructive plot and refuse to see him from this point on: his
mother, above all, ‘who never spoke to me, never made
confession, never gave me back what I needed, the certainty
of her love’ (MLS 432). The complicated detective-story plot
takes over from this point, complete with hired snoops and
contract killers; the note of parody is never far below the
surface.9 Aurora is killed in a fall from the high terrace of her
Bombay house, where each year on her birthday she has danced
a defiant, secular ‘dance against the gods’ (MLS 315). Or was she
pushed? And if so, by whom? Only at the end do we learn that
her husband, Abraham Zogoiby, was responsible, Moor’s own
father, who turns out with typical Rushdie hyperbole to be ‘the
most evil man that ever lived’ (MLS 417). As the truth of the
picture emerges, Moor is employed by his father’s business rival
Mainduck in a campaign of violent reprisal (reminiscent more of
Shame than Midnight’s Children) which reveals that corruption
extends further than was ever imagined, implicating the very
structures of government. But a familiar Rushdian apocalypse
awaits the big players in this dubious game. There is an
explosion that destroys whole buildings in the centre of Bombay,
and in the confusion that follows Moor takes off for Spain to
avoid arrest. Here, as if sleepwalking into the further ramifications of his own plot, he stumbles into Vasco Miranda’s mad
world of art – from which he is only saved, at the end, by the
fairy-tale splinter of glass that has been lodged in Miranda’s
murderous heart.
The narrative is deliberately pushed over the edge with
parodic reworkings of other plots, constellated with allusions,
and refracted through a series of stylistic variations. For Rushdie,
this is how narrative works: by accretion, complication,
parallelism, inversion. This is his architecture. But at the same
time the narrative is intended to deliver something else. The
Moor’s Last Sigh is powered by a nucleus of related ethical ideas,
each of which bears closely on the other, and which may be said
to subtend the moral preoccupations of the patriarch Francisco
da Gama and his son (Moor’s uncle) Camoens. These relate to
the nature of identity, both racial and personal; to the
competition between ideas of singularity and multiplicity; and
beyond this to the nature and truth of artistic representation. It
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is the engagement with identity, the shifting boundaries of the
self, that gives the most direct access to these, associated as it is
(here as in The Satanic Verses) with the fiction-making process
itself. Underneath Rushdie’s narrative of Spanish India there runs
a passionate desire for love and harmony: the transcendence of
the single, isolated self in a love that, while being personal and
sexual, is also imaginative and inclusive, passing out into the
infinite. This ethical dimension is introduced by Francisco da
Gama via a scientific theory explicitly derived from Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist: a science-fiction version of Stephen Dedalus’s
forge for creating the conscience of his race, whereby a magnetic
‘Field of Conscience’ is maintained in the atmosphere in response
to people’s behaviour on earth. Rather like an ethical ozone layer
– though it has to be said big holes are blown in this before the
end. And, just as Shelley reminded us that ethical behaviour
begins with the ability to ‘put [oneself] in the place of another
and of many others’,10 so too for Rushdie it is in the going
beyond the self that we may discover our full human value. The
extreme instance of this is in the idea of being flayed: literally,
losing the distinguishing and separating skin in a ‘naked unity of
the flesh’ (MLS 414). The image is introduced by Francisco’s
daughter-in-law Carmen as an expression of sexual guilt that
longs for ablation: ‘flay me flay my skin from my body whole entire and
let me start again let me be of no race no name no sex’ (MLS 47). But it is
taken over by Moor himself, associated with an anatomical
illustration he has seen as a child: ‘When I was young I used to
dream . . . of peeling off my skin plaintain-fashion, of going forth
naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from
Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of
colour, race and clan.’ This fantasy of self-forgetting is taken even
further, he recalls, in ‘another version of the dream’ in which he
would be able to peel away more than skin, and float free of the
body altogether, becoming ‘simply an intelligence or a feeling set
loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow
which needed no physical form’ (MLS 136). So far, so good; this
reads positively, like a psychedelic trip.
But there are bad trips too. A terrifying, negative version of
the image occurs during Moor’s incarceration: ‘As roaches
crawled and mosquitoes stung, so I felt that my skin was indeed
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coming away from my body, as I had dreamed so long ago that it
would. But in this version of the dream, my peeling skin took
with it all elements of my personality.’ And here in the prison,
forced to reflect, he perceives that the source of this annihilation
is identical with the source of life: his mother. Hers is the real,
psychological violence he translates into such physical terms:
‘And when he is flayed, when he is a shape without frontiers, a
self without walls, then your hands close about his neck . . . he is
farting out his life, just as once you, his mother, farted him into
it’ (MLS 288). But the image returns in its positive form right at
the end, in the lyrical culmination to the novel, a passage that
reads almost like an epilogue, where Moor has ‘scrambled over
rough ground ’ to sit on his own tombstone and reflect on the sum
of experience that has brought him here: ’Thorns, branches and
stones tore at my skin. I paid no attention to these wounds; if my skin
was falling from me at last, I was happy to shed that load.’ The terms
used here clearly refer to the narrative of Christ’s passion and
death (immediately before this, the written sheets of Moor’s
story are ‘nailed to the landscape in my wake’), just as Joyce
alludes to this in the last paragraph of his story ‘The Dead’. The
figure of the flayed man is also Christ whipped with thorns in
the temple before his crucifixion, fulfilling this other system of
reference. And, from his vantage point on the tombstone (which
is both spatial and temporal), Moor looks out across the valley to
the symbolic Alhambra, where the personal image is taken up in
a broader, cross-cultural vision:
the glory of the Moors, their triumphant masterpiece and their last redoubt.
The Alhambra, Europe’s red fort, sister to Delhi’s and Agra’s – the palace of
interlocking forms and secret wisdom, of pleasure-courts and water-gardens,
that monument to a lost possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing,
long after its conquerors have fallen; like a testament to lost but sweetest love,
to the love that endures beyond defeat, beyond annihilation, beyond despair;
to the defeated love that is greater than what defeats it, to that most profound
of our needs, to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers,
for the dropping of the boundaries of the self. (MLS 433)
The intensely concrete and physical image of flaying (which
may contain a reference to Swift’s livid image of the woman
flayed from A Tale of a Tub, as well as to Beckett’s character
Lemuel who is ‘flayed alive by memory’ in Malone Dies11)
intersects with the idea of the plurality and malleability of the
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personality that we have met elsewhere in Rushdie, and which
is treated if anything more systematically in this novel. Early on,
the personality of his grandfather provides Moor with an
example: ‘To me, the doublenesses in Grandfather Camoens
reveal his beauty; his willingness to permit the coexistence
within himself of conflicting impulses is the source of his full,
gentle humanness’ (MLS 32). Francisco’s ‘Fields of Conscience’
have at least forged his son’s moral vision; a realization through
fictional character of the notion of ‘negative capability’ which
Keats identified in Shakespeare; ‘when man is capable of being
in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’12
The desire for transcendence associated with this image is felt
both personally (in love) and politically, in a vision of culture.
Moor provides the relevant meditation on love whilst in prison,
still suffering from the trauma of Uma Sarasvati’s death and his
mother’s betrayal.
I wanted to cling to the image of love as a blending of spirits, as
mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of
us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere,
the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the
no-man-is-an-island, two’s company Many over the clean, mean,
apartheiding Ones. (MLS 289)
The terminology used here clearly moves beyond personal love
to a more comprehensive vision of understanding. This vision
has been articulated earlier by the idealistic Camoens to his
daughter Belle. He invites her to imagine, and to help create, ‘a
new world, Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular,
above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above
hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe
because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour
because multi-coloured . . . ’(MLS 51). Not surprisingly, Camoens’s
new world has so far failed to materialize. But it is symbolically
represented in Rushdie’s novel by the culture of the fabulous
Alhambra, where Europe met Africa, Christianity and Judaism
met Islam, in pluralist embrace, a rare instance of racial and
religious tolerance. The Moor’s Last Sigh is partly an elegy for that
culture, and for the very ideals it represented – the more
movingly so for the sense the novel conveys of the impssibility of
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recreating anything resembling it in twentieth-century India; or,
for that matter, of rediscovering its rare virtues anywhere else in
the modern world.
Such virtues depend upon a philosophical preference for the
plural over the singular, the dialectical over the monologic; a
preference that is most consistently expressed through Aurora’s
paintings. It is the ‘torrential reality of India’ (MLS 45) that
awakens her art in the first place, and when Camoens sees the
murals she has painted during her solitary confinement he
exclaims: ‘But it is the great swarm of being itself.’ Figures from
ancient and modern history consort with hybrids from her own
imagination, ‘half-woman half-tiger, half-man half-snake . . . seamonsters and mountain ghouls’. Vasco da Gama is there,
claimed as an ancestor:
Aurora had composed her giant work in such a way that the images
of her own family had to fight their way through this hyperabundance of imagery, she was suggesting that the privacy of Cabral
Island was an illusion and this mountain, this hive, this endlessly
metamorphic line of humanity was the truth . . . (MLS 59–60)
Whatever political and personal distractions intervene (and
many do), this is the dominant form of her art: ‘the mythic–
romantic mode in which history, family, politics and fantasy
jostled each other like the great crowds at V.T. or Churchgate
Stations’ (MLS 203–4). This is what we might call the Bombay
Alhambra, which can only be represented in a mode that
includes but goes beyond realism; as Vasco Miranda succinctly
declares at one point, ‘a canvas is not a mirror’ (MLS 158). And
the principles of Aurora’s painting are intended to reflect
Rushdie’s own practice as a writer. The rich invocation of the
Spanish and Portuguese past in the novel, the documentation of
the political instability of the inter-war years in India, and the
description of modern Bombay (‘that super-epic motion picture
of a city’ (MLS 129) ) match the detailed description of the
paintings, words aspiring to iconicity, within the figure of
ekphrasis previously identified.
The paintings at this stage, in her mid-career, are devoted to
the effacement of dividing lines: ‘the dividing lines between two
worlds, became in many of these pictures the main focus’;
water, land, and air are allowed to merge as Aurora proposes her
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own ‘political’ version of this blending: ‘Call it Mooristan . . . Call
it Palimpstine.’ And the political significance is underlined, as
Rushdie develops and exploits the possibilities of his selfreflexive commentary: ‘In a way these were polemical pictures,
in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the
plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine
India’ (MLS 226–7). As is implied here, the idea of the palimpsest
provides a key to the novel: both the literal palimpsest (exampled
by Aurora’s painting ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’, and also, as it
happens, by an actual portrait of Rushdie’s mother13) and the
metaphorical palimpsest, as a ‘layering’ or re-presentation or
disguise of any other kind. Rushdie makes use of this metaphor
to describe the corrupt commercial practices of Abraham
Zogoiby in a passage which has a more general epistemological
bearing – recalling as it does the ‘permeation of the real world
by the fictional’ in the earlier ‘Ruby Slippers’ story from East,
West.
The city itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under
World beneath Over World, black market beneath white; when the
whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved
phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings,
how then could Abraham’s career have been any different? How
could any of us have escaped that deadly layering? How, trapped as
we were in the hundred per cent fakery of the real, in the fancydress, weeping-Arab kitsch of the superficial, could we have
penetrated to the full, sensual truth of the lost mother below?
How could we have lived authentic lives? (MLS 184–5).
It is one of the remarkable features of The Moor ’s Last Sigh that
these moral ideas are not only entertained but tested to
destruction in the novel. This trial of the limits is conducted
through the agency of Uma Sarasvati, the novel’s contradictory
and equivocating angel–devil. It is Uma whom Moor falls in love
with, and who teaches him love’s transcendent value; only here
can he perceive that love overbalances truth, only here are his
belief systems fundamentally (and creatively) challenged: ‘I do
not believe it; I believe it; I do not believe; I believe; I do not, I do
not; I do’ (MLS 251–2). But having established her power Uma
betrays him in the cruellest way possible – sending his parents a
tape-recording of their lovemaking, during which she has
tempted him to say unforgiveable things. In the sequel she
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actually tries to kill him, in a trick suicide pact which is bizarrely
bungled and results in her own death when two tablets are
swapped after a clash of heads (MLS 281): one thinks of the
switched swords in the last scene of Hamlet. And following up
Rushdie’s own references to Keats, one might suggest that Uma
is more chilling than ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, the classic
femme fatale, being more a kind of postmodern Lamia – the snake
disguised as a woman. She herself has ‘no ‘‘authentic’’ identity’
(MLS 266), and so, like a cold window distilling vapour, is able to
drain other people of theirs. It is significant that when the
Zogoiby family meets her at the racecourse ‘every one of us had
a fiercely held opinion about her, and many of these opinions
contradicted each other utterly and were incapable of being
reconciled’ (MLS 243). As such, her very embodiment of plural
identity reverses its value – a perception Moor records as a ‘bitter
parable’ in which ‘the polarities of good and evil were reversed’:
‘For in the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been the pluralist Uma,
with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment to the
infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional
sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg; and Aurora
had fried her . . . ’(MLS 272). For Moor–Othello chaos has come
again; his intellectual as well as his emotional world is turned
upside-down. Uma ‘showed me the truth’, he says, but it is the
kind of truth that is worse than lies – or which confuses these
categories in a more powerful drug: ‘Whoever and whatever she
had been, good or evil or neither or both, it is undeniable that I
had loved her’ (MLS 241, 281).
And for Aurora too there is a convulsion, in her art as well as
her politics. From this point on she abandons her hybrid forms,
and comes under the influence of the Hindu activist Minto with
his dangerous separatist ideas: ‘Aurora, that lifelong advocate of
the many against the one, had with Minto’s help discovered
some fundamental verities’ (MLS 272). In her earlier paintings,
her son Moraes has served for Aurora as a symbol for India itself;
he has been the centre of her pictorial narrative. ‘And I was
happy to be there, because the story unfolding on her canvases
seemed more like my autobiography than the real story of my
life’ (MLS 227). But this very symbol is now invalidated and
reversed, in the ‘Moor in Exile’ sequence; the personal and the
political have been simultaneously betrayed in art.
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And the Moor-figure: alone now, motherless, he sank into
immorality, and was shown as a creature of shadows, degraded in
tableaux of debauchery and crime. He appeared to lose, in these last
pictures, his previous metaphorical rôle as a unifier of opposites, a
standard-bearer of pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol – however
approximate – of the new nation, and being transformed, instead,
into a semi-allegorical figure of decay.
The philosophical conclusion comes in what follows, proof of a
dismaying contamination of cultural ideals by personal jealousy
and disappointment. ‘Aurora had apparently decided that the
ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and mélange which had
been, for most of her creative life, the closest things she had
found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion,
and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light.’ We
are returned to the perilous depths of The Satanic Verses, where
human behaviour becomes frighteningly unreliable and ambiguous, as different motives come into view. Her son now appears
to Aurora as a fleur du mal; and we have a quotation from
Baudelaire to make the point (MLS 303).
The renegade painter Vasco Miranda also plays his part in this
process of destruction from within. Destroyed by his jealousy of
Aurora’s talent, he has sold out his own art to commerce,
producing a readily consumable ‘airport art’ that mischievously
alludes to Salvador Dali’s facile surrealism. But he takes his
surname, after all, from Shakespeare’s wide-eyed heroine in The
Tempest, with her wonderment at the promise of new worlds;
and, true to this suggestion, he promises on his removal to Spain
to recreate ‘in his ‘‘Little Alhambra’’, the fabulous multiple
culture of ancient al-Andalus’ (MLS 398). But his ‘new society’
turns out to be a megalomaniac’s prison; and he it is, in the
novel’s extraordinary penultimate scene, who shoots the lost
portrait through the heart for it to bleed with the life blood of the
Japanese artist whom he has employed to work on its restoration.
She herself plays a symbolic role, both as the disbelieving auditor
and innocent victim of Moor’s story, and also, through her very
name, as a kind of good angel – the spirit of art, and the binding
powers of language. ‘Her name was a miracle of vowels. Aoi Uë:
the five enabling sounds of language . . . constructed her’ (MLS
423). So both Uma and Vasco contribute to the novel’s real
tragedy, ‘the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the
defeat of the Many by the One’ (MLS 408).
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But there is another, more undermining level of scepticism
loose in the novel. It is not only Aurora herself, but her critics
(including her son) who are entitled to a judgement of her
paintings; and so Moor’s developing awareness of the potential
for falsity in his mother’s pictures – reciprocating her judgement
of him – opens up another series of intriguing questions.
Although Moor feels at one point, as we have seen, that her
pictorial narrative ‘seemed more like [his] autobiography than
the real story of [his] life’, he comes to realize, later, that those of
his mother’s paintings which are motivated by her jealousy of
Uma are themselves perverse, and ‘did not necessarily bear the
slightest connection to events and feelings and people in the
real world’ (MLS 247). This is a disabling realization for him, as
the subject of these paintings, but also for us, as readers of
Rushdie’s novel; because the question is intended to destabilize
the paintings’ frame-text in the novel itself. If the paintings can
tell lies, then so can any art; and this may explain why at several
points in the novel Moor is careful himself to question the truth
of elements included in his own narrative. ‘I have grave doubts
about the literal truth of the story’ of the painting The Moor’s Last
Sigh, he tells us; and, whereas he goes on to assure his reader
that ‘of the truth of these further stories there can be no doubt
whatsoever’, he adds, in deference to the omnipotent reader, ‘it
is not for me to judge, but for you’ (MLS 79, 85). We have to set
alongside this the deliberate provocation whereby Rushdie
mixes in historical materials with his fiction: as when he implies
that Aurora might have had an affair with Nehru – quoting in
his text from published letters between Nehru and Mrs Gandhi,
which are duly cited in the Acknowledgements; and when he
makes a knowing allusion to the critic Homi Bhabha in the name
of a purchaser of one of Aurora’s paintings (MLS 117–18, 435;
419). We also have to consider the implications of inviting
characters from his other novels into this one – a manœuvre that
might be considered either intriguingly self-reflexive or simply
self-indulgent. (In either case, Rushdie would be familiar with
such textual migration in the work of the eighteenth-century
novelists: we find examples in both Fielding and Smollett). Aadam
Sinai turns up from Midnight’s Children to be adopted by
Abraham Zogoiby in preference to his own son, Moor; and
Zeeny Vakil from The Satanic Verses appears in her role as critic of
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Aurora’s paintings – and gets killed for her pains, in the
cataclysmic explosion at the end. This intertextual trespass poses
a curious question: are we meant to wonder what effect this death
might have on the Saladin Chamcha in whose company she was
left at the end of the earlier novel?
It is not only the discourse of art but the ‘ordinary’ narrative
discourse within the novel that is hedged around with doubts
and hesitations and uncertainties. ‘It is difficult for me, after all
these years, to know what to believe,’ Moor confesses as he
writes out his story – a sentiment shared by Aoi Uë as she listens
to him. It is ‘the old biographer’s problem: even when people
are telling their own life stories, they are invariably improving
on the facts’ (MLS 135). Ironically, Zeeny Vakil says ‘I blame
fiction’ for the return of religious tensions: ‘the followers of one
fiction knock down another popular piece of make-believe, and
bingo! It’s war’ (MLS 351). Moor himself, unable to make sense
of the revelation that it was his own father who killed his mother
– a revelation made immediately before Miranda’s shooting of
Uë – admits, ‘I was lost in fictions, and murder was all around’
(MLS 418). Moor has retained his truth claim to this point,
almost like a fetish. ‘I must peel off history, the prism of the
past,’ we find him saying one-third of the way through the novel.
‘It is time for a sort of ending, for the truth about myself to
struggle out from under my parents’ stifling power’ (MLS 136).
Later, as he faces up to Uma’s instability, he forces himself to
realize: ‘This is not a game. This is happening. It is my life, our
life, and this its shape. This its true shape, the shape behind all
shapes, the shape that reveals itself only at the moment of truth.’
But later still there are still darker truths to acknowledge.
But now I knew everything. No more benefits of doubts. Uma, my
beloved traitor, you were ready to play the game to the end; to
murder me and watch my death while hallucinogens blew your
mind. . . . It must be the plain truth; everything about Uma and
Aurora, Aurora and me, me and Uma Sarasvati, my witch. I would
set it all down, and surrender myself to his sentence. (MLS 280,
321–2)
Even as he is ‘writing for his life’ at Miranda’s direction –
awaiting his captor’s ‘sentence’ – his obsession with the truth of
his narration invites us to look over the novelist’s shoulder,
responsible as he is for his character’s act of writing. We are
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invited to review the novel we have been reading: ‘On my little
table in that death-cell young Abraham Zogoiby wooed his
spice-heiress and aligned himself with love and beauty against
the forces of ugliness and hate; and was that true, or was I
putting Aoi’s words into my father’s thought-bubble?’ Carmen
da Gama is just ‘a creature of my mind’: as are all the characters,
‘as they must be, having no means of being other than through
my words’ (MLS 425). We accompany the writer as he sails close
to the wind of his intention, confiding in what he deferentially
calls ‘my omnipotent reader’ his authorial uncertainties, and
asking for our understanding (MLS 145).14
Miranda’s accomplices the Ramirez sisters tell Moor, on his
predestined arrival at Benengeli, ‘You have come on a great
pilgrimage. . . . A son in search of his lost mother’s treasures’
(MLS 400). He never finds or, at least, never retrieves the lost
painting; no more did Rushdie himself, in the actual family
incident on which this episode is also based. But he does find
the greater treasure of himself, as has been promised from the
outset: ‘the story which points to me. On the run, I have turned
the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading
X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself’ (MLS 3). Walter
Benjamin observed, ‘Not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom,
but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are
made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his
death.’15 Moor writes his story at the point of Vasco Miranda’s
gun, and takes the pages, literally, to his grave: ‘I have used the
last of my strength to make this pilgrimage’ (MLS 422–3). It is a
pilgrimage that ends with a positive vision, with the promise of
resurrection and renewed hope – addressed appropriately
enough, we may feel, through its carefully chosen cross-cultural
references, to Rushdie’s expectant, worldwide audience.
The world is full of sleepers waiting for their moment of return: Arthur
sleeps in Avalon, Barbarossa in his cave. Finn MacCool lies in the Irish
hillsides and the Worm Ouroboros on the bed of the Sundering Sea.
Australia’s ancestors, the Wandjina, take their ease underground, and
somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty in a glass coffin awaits a prince’s
kiss. See: here is my flask. I’ll drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day
Van Winkle, I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone . . . and hope to awaken,
renewed and joyful, into a better time. (MLS 433–4)
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8
Interchapter:
Twelve years later...
This book on Rushdie’s fiction, first published in 1999, borrows a
device from fiction itself to bring the story (or the commentary
on the stories) up to date. It is now 2011; by which time the
author has celebrated his 60th birthday, published four further
novels, moved to his third continent, and seen other significant
changes in his life – not least, becoming in 2007 Sir Salman
Rushdie, thus lining himself up beside the fictional father-figure
from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the ennobled anglophile Sir
Darius Cama. One is sure Sir Darius would have been pleased
(and we overlook the fact that in the novel itself Sir Darius is
later disgraced, and returns the citation for his knighthood).
Meanwhile this novel, anticipated at the end of the last
chapter, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, was published in 1999, and
partly because of its upfront subject matter – rock music – and
partly because of its relocation – via Bombay and London to
America – enjoyed a somewhat mixed critical reception. (More
on that in a moment; I must not get ahead of myself.) Later that
same year Rushdie met the actress and model Padma Lakshmi.
In 2000, having eventually been granted a visa, he travelled with
his son Zafar to India, for a kind of reconciliation with the
country ‘after a gap of twelve-and-a-half years’.1 At the end of
the same year he expressed his frustration with life in London
and moved to New York.2 The novel Fury was published in 2001,
with the Empire State Building impaling bright clouds on the
cover; just weeks before the Twin Towers come tumbling down
in Manhattan. This time, the novel was greeted in some quarters
with frank hostility. One reviewer went so far as to say it was
time for Rushdie to be ‘relegated’ to a second division of
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novelists, prompting a spirited defence by John Sutherland of a
Rushdie who had been unfairly victimized by the press.3 2003
sees a second collection of Rushdie’s essays, Step Across This Line.
These essays are from the previous ten years, and include many
written towards the end of this decade for the New York Times
and the New Yorker, which together give some idea of Rushdie’s
increasing identification with his newly-adopted country and its
values. (It is not for nothing that the volume is dedicated to
Christopher Hitchens.) Again, critics underline the ideological
shift from the earlier direct criticism of America (most explicit in
The Jaguar Smile) to that of an essay such as ‘Anti-Americanism’,
where he turns on his earlier self, criticizing the ‘hypocrisy’ of
the rest of the world, ‘hating most what it desires most’, and
arguing that ‘we need the United States to exercise its power and
economic might responsibly’ (SAL 399–400). Anshuman Mondal
traces this fault-line in his essay ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet and
Fury: The reinvention of location’, remarking:
In an ironic instance of the hyperreality that he elsewhere critiques,
Rushdie’s later ‘writing self’ seems to have merged with that
simulacrum of him that had been deployed in polarised debates
about the ‘Rushdie affair’. Writing from within the celebrity
glasshouse, his work is now as much written from the American
centre as about it, as much a reinforcement of his own celebrity as an
indictment of the culture that sustains it, as much an articulation of
globalisation as a critique of it. The result is a chronic ambivalence.4
In 2004, his marriage to Elizabeth West (mother of his second
son Milan) being previously dissolved, Rushdie marries Padma
Lakshmi, an actress and model half his age. There is the
inevitable glare of publicity; there are invitations to the White
House, presentations, parties. Rushdie appears as himself in a
film; his life starts to resemble what he has often described, life
as a performance of itself.5 Shalimar the Clown is published in
2005, the novel turning out to be not just about the trials of
Kashmir but also exposing the uneasy dialogue between India
and America. Two years later, Rushdie is offered and ‘humbly
accepts’ a knighthood; this episode prompts some tart articles in
the press and contributions online, and marks a further shift in
how Rushdie is now perceived by his readers, with an increasing
polarization between the view that he is still our greatest
novelist (a view seemingly confirmed by the ‘Best of Booker’
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INTERCHAPTER
award for Midnight’s Children in 2008), and a frankly defamatory
assessment which sees Rushdie as a spent force, his writing
mired in self-regard, equivocation and complicity. Priyamvada
Gopal for example laments that whereas Salman Rushdie was
motivated by an ‘uncompromising ethical vision’, Sir Salman has
now ‘abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as
‘‘giving the lie to official facts’’’ and so his recent fiction has
deservedly ‘disappeared into a critical wasteland’.6 The next
month, Rushdie’s marriage to Padma Lakshmi ends in divorce,
and he declares in an interview that ‘marriage is no longer
necessary’. In 2008 he publishes The Enchantress of Florence, fruit
of Rushdie’s long-standing interest in the city and its more
celebrated sons (and daughters). Then in 2010 there is a second
children’s story, Luka and the Fire of Life, written, Rushdie tells us,
because his eleven-year-old son Milan felt that he should have
his own story, just as Haroun had been dedicated to Zafar ten
years previously. Finally, there seem to be some signs of a shift
away from prose fiction altogether, as Rushdie engages to write a
TV series, ‘in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over
from film and the novel as the best way of communicating ideas
and stories’.7
Now read on.
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9
The Ground Beneath
Her Feet
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is that paradoxical thing, a novel
about music and photography. Framed, filmed, and with full
surround sound, it issues directly from – enacts, and tries to be
part of – that thunderous, subversive, sexual, and heteroglossic
musical scene that began in the late 1950s, rode the waves for
two or three decades, and still keeps us afloat on its diversifying
currents. Rushdie has said it is ‘the sound-track of my life’.1 In
order to keep up with its subject, and its characters, the novel is
written in a style that James Wood has unkindly but not unfairly
described as ‘hysterical realism’,2 a development from Rushdie’s
earlier and still recognizable style, but ratcheted up by several
degrees of hyperbole. It is louder, more gesticulatory, more
high-pitched, more vulgar, and more omnivorous. Five pages
into the first chapter, we are told by the excitable narrator Rai
that ‘the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara’ (whom we have
met in the first sentence) ‘looked stretched, unstable, too bright,
as if she were on the point of flying apart like an exploding
lightbulb, like a supernova, like the universe’ (GBF 7). The
dilating scale is proclaimed unashamedly, and indeed this first
proleptic chapter functions as an all-action ‘trailer’ to the novel
which follows, introducing characters and themes with a
clashing of symbols, an earthquake, and other big brassy notes.
Newspapers ‘with their shrieking ink’ attend on ‘the whole
appalling menagerie of the rock world’, written up by Rai in
Rushdie’s familiar ‘Hug-me, Hindu Urdu Gujarati Marathi
English: Bombayites like me were people who spoke five
languages badly and no language well’ (GBF 4,11,7).
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THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
But though he evidently frets here within its archaic
limitations,3 Rushdie has not quite forgotten that he is writing
a novel; and there is plenty of literary superstructure to remind
us of the fact. We are in Mexico, and it is Lawrence’s plumed
serpent Quetzalcoatl that writhes in the first paragraph. Vina’s
death deprives her ‘of the right to follow her life’s verses to the
final, fulfilling rhyme’ (GBF 5). Her deceased one-night stand,
we are told, was speaking Orcish, ‘the infernal speech devised
for the servants of the Dark Lord Sauron by the writer Tolkien’;
whose own rhyme, ‘One ring to rule them all . . . ’ is then dutifully
quoted (GBF 5,6). Gluck’s Orfeo is appellated in Rai’s appalling
pizza-register (’Happy it up, ja! – Sure, Herr Gluck, don’t get so
agitato’). We are told of Vina’s own reading: Enid Blyton’s
Faraway Tree series (GBF 12,16). And then we get the real thing,
as Rai descends with trepidation (and with Virgil) into ‘this
underworld of ink and lies’; ‘at the gate of the inferno of
language, there’s a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a
coin under my tongue for the fare’. It hardly seems to be the
same Rai who asks us, ‘Do you know the Fourth Georgic of . . . P.
Virgilius Maro?’ and who then goes on to inform us about
Aristaeus the beekeeper, who tells the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice in Virgil’s poem (GBF 21). The superstructure is in
place; Rai’s own name is made of the first three letters of
Aristarchus;4 this chapter is called ‘The Keeper of Bees’, and the
bees are identified with photographs. Drawing back further, we
can appreciate that the structuring of the novel into eighteen
chapters is no doubt a homage to Joyce and the structure of
Ulysses, with the first chapter as prologue, and the last three
chapters (after the death of Vina) serving as a sort of epilogue;
and also in some ways as a decompression chamber, setting us
down in the ordinary, recognizable world. Another Joycean
reflex; though it must be said this is hardly typical of the novel as
a whole, which reverberates to other rhythms. But at the level of
presentation, we can perceive that the multilayeredness of the
narrative, with its recurrence of phrases, refrains, motifs, and its
network of allusions, suggests an updating of the celebrated
Joycean mosaic to register late twentieth-century culture. And
when we remember that Joyce himself was fascinated by the
early cinema, and that what were long read as newspaper
headlines in the Aeolus chapter are now better understood as
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screen captions, then we can concede that the mosaic was ready
to be reassembled.
As is implicit in these introductory remarks, one cannot
possibly do justice to the scale and complexity of Rushdie’s
narrative without providing a summary of some kind, and I will
attempt to provide this, with a light critical commentary, before
passing on in the second part of the chapter to a more
developed engagement with critical questions prompted by
the novel. We need at the outset to be formally introduced to
Rushdie’s narrator, ‘me, Mr Umeed Merchant, photographer,
a.k.a ‘‘Rai’’’ (GBF 5). His is the perspective we have to rely upon
for our access to the story, and (though Rushdie sits on his
shoulder) his is the style in which it is garrulously and
uninhibitedly delivered. Whatever we ourselves may think,
Rushdie has confessed that for him, ‘one of the things that was
most pleasurable in writing the book was having him come alive
on the page and begin to speak. I loved his voice’.5 Not least, at
some points – especially towards the end – he shoulders himself
forward as a participant in the events he is describing and even
makes off with his own happy ending. Rai is, as he has told us, a
photographer, a ‘shutterbug ’, an ‘image stealer’, and his
profession provides Rushdie very conveniently with a whole
range of visual images and metaphors that frame the novel and
are used for the articulation of its themes.
What Rai is entrusted with is the story of two Indian rock
stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, who – we are invited to
believe, in a provocative gesture of historical and cultural
inversion – have themselves magically anticipated western
popular music, in a kind of unlikely acoustic prequel. They are
the best, the brightest, the most unforgettable; everyone loves
them, and (in their way) they love each other. But their way is
the modern way of celebrity, cursed with a self-destructiveness
that expresses itself first in India, then in Europe, and finally in
America, where they both meet their deaths: she in an
earthquake in Mexico whose seismic foreshocks – and aftershocks – are felt throughout the novel, and he later shot, John
Lennon-like, in New York by a woman who could well be the
ghost of Vina herself, inviting Ormus to join her in the other
world he has so long hungered for. This late- and larger-thanlife picaresque narrative (because if we replace the picaro with
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THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
the celebrity, the episodic journey structure is much the same) is
grafted onto the Orpheus myth, whose fatal example functions
as another leitmotiv; and whose many versions, ancient and
modern, poetic and operatic, allow Rushdie to play his own
variations on the theme. But it is a measure of Rushdie’s
ambition in this long novel (at 575 pages, it is longer even than
the expansive Satanic Verses) that this is only one in a complex
series of references, allusions and parallels, explicit and oblique,
from literature, music, film, photography, and of course the
ground of these art forms in history itself: especially modern
history – we are singed here with ‘the white heat of the present
tense’ (GBF 291). It is through this high-powered and multilayered narrative that Rushdie aims to encapsulate and deliver
our modern world in all its seductive and degenerate splendour.
The first proleptic chapter ended with Rai bracing and telling
himself: ‘Begin’ (GBF 22). And at the beginning proper we are
introduced to two Bombay families, both alike in dignity; Rai’s
own parents, the Merchants, and the Camas, Sir Darius (an
ennobled anglophile) and Lady Spenta. The Merchants first
meet each other, and the two couples are introduced, on the day
of Ormus Cama’s birth, which is announced with a familiar
gesture:
Ormus Cama was born in Bombay, India, in the early hours of May
27, 1937, and within moments of his birth began making the strange,
rapid finger movements with both hands which any guitarist could
have identified as chord progressions. (GBF 23)
His hours-older twin brother Gayomart dies in the same
childbed. Symmetry insists that the Camas ‘already had a fiveyear-old pair of dizygotic male twins, Khusro and Ardaviraf,
known to one and all as ‘‘Cyrus and Virus’’’, who feature along
with dead Gayo in their brother’s story. Virus as a child is struck
by a cricket ball driven by his father and deprived of speech,
retreating into ‘the mystery of inner space’, while the repentant
Darius gives up cricket (and conversation) for studious application to ‘the relationships between the Homeric and the Indian
mythological traditions’ (GBF 41). The trials of this unhappy
family continue when Cyrus tries to suffocate his baby brother
Ormus (whom he blames for the cricketing accident), and
spends the rest of his strange life in custody, until he escapes
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and murders his father; while Ormus is shadowed by Gayomart,
as if in preparation for his own career.
It is at this point – as it happens, in September 1939 – that a
sheet of newspaper blows into Darius’s window, bringing with
it ‘the stink of the real world’ (GBF 44). The narrator is not even
born yet, and so his role has not really begun; we are
temporarily in the hands of an omniscient narrator, and the
device is typical of how Rushdie takes us back into the toils of
history, which will condition his characters’ lives. Rai is ten years
younger than Ormus, making him as old as new India, and as
one Saleem Sinai, whom we remember from Midnight’s Children;
and coincidentally as old as Rushdie himself. He claims his own
role in the narrative when as a small boy he meets and falls in
love with the teenage Vina Apsara on Bombay’s Juhu Beach.
This is in the context of a confrontation with Piloo Doodhwala, a
devious businessman (who is destined for satirical analysis later
in the novel) and Rai’s upright father, in consequence of which
Vina comes to live with Rai’s parents. Young Rai sees Vina as a
kind of ‘Cinderella of Troy’ – his system of reference coming
from Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, among other sources – and
from this moment he is captivated by her, setting her up as his
absolute standard of value. ‘When I met Vina at the beach, I
knew for the first time how to measure my worth. I would look
for my answers in her eyes’ (GBF 69,75).6
There are other devices on display as the narrative unfolds;
Rai/Rushdie’s advice to himself not to get ‘too far ahead of my
tale’, repeated proleptic gestures (’Ormus Cama did not sing
again for fourteen years’) and simple resolutions confided to the
reader: ‘I must briefly halt my runaway bus of a narrative’ (GBF
36,47,86). These are familiar to any reader of Rushdie, as reflexes
of his storytelling. More elaborate are the two paragraphs that
conclude chapter 3, ‘Legends of Thrace’, where, the day after
Ormus has arrived at his parents’ door in pursuit of Vina, Rai
bids farewell to his childhood happiness and anticipates trials to
come:
It was the beginning of the end of my days of joy, spent with those
Thracian deities, my parents, amid legends of the city’s past and
visions of its future. After a childhood of being loved, of believing in
the safety of our little world, things would begin to crumble for me,
my parents would quarrel horribly and die before their time.
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But Rai’s anticipation does not stop there. In a surprising move
which leaps to the very end of the novel, dilating the adverb
‘now’ and as it were short-circuiting the story, he continues:
Now there is at last a new flowering of happiness in my life. (This,
too, will be told at the proper time.) Perhaps this is why I can face the
horror of the past. It’s tough to speak of the beauty of the world
when one has lost one’s sight . . . hard to write about love, even
harder to write lovingly, when one has a broken heart. (GBF 84–5)
Chapter 4, ‘The Invention of Music’, sets the narrative on its
adult trajectory, and moves back into the hyperbolic register
which is the verbal parallel to Ormus’s career. It is here that Rai
as acolyte makes his bid to establish Ormus’s genius; and the
paragraph in which he does so is deliberately pitched to an
extreme, as if to silence any doubts.
If I say that Ormus Cama was the greatest popular singer of all, the
one whose genius exceeded all others, who was never caught by the
pursuing pack, then I am confident that even my toughest-minded
reader will concede the point. He was a musical sorcerer whose
melodies could make the city streets begin to dance and high
buildings sway to their rhythm, a golden troubadour the jouncy
poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the very gates of Hell; he
incarnated the singer and songwriter as shaman and spokesman,
and became the age’s unholy unfool.
There are immediately problems here as the reader (toughminded or not) recognizes the narrator’s irony at the same time
as being required to accept his claims – otherwise, the story of
an Indian Orpheus is simply not going to work. And this irony is
underlined by a dismissive reference further down the same
page to ‘the fame of a young truck-driver from Tupelo, Miss.,
born in a shotgun shack with a dead twin by his side’: one Jesse
Garon Parker, who will become none other than Elvis Presley;
though it is the rule of Rushdie’s alternative world that this
obliterating name cannot be mentioned, for fear of collapsing
the fiction.7 Rai can at least protest that he is not making all this
up, since he has Ormus’s own word to go on:
But by his own account he was more than that; for he claimed to be
nothing less than the secret originator, the prime innovator, of the
music that courses in our blood, that possesses and moves us,
wherever we may be, the music that speaks the secret language of all
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humanity, our common heritage, whatever mother tongue we speak,
whatever dances we first learned to dance. (GBF 89)
Of course, there is no such music, nor could there be; but never
let it be said that Rushdie understates his case. This introduction
is followed by an account of the first meeting of Ormus and Vina
in the Rhythm Center music shop; an account which later
commentators are allowed to have challenged as apocryphal,
though we have it given in some detail here (GBF 92–4). And
once Ormus and Vina are an ‘item’, Rai has to switch into a new
series of superlatives.
Sometimes I thought of Ormus and Vina as worshippers at the altar
of their own love, which they spoke of in the most elevated language.
Never were there such lovers, never had feelings of such depth, such
magnificence, been felt by other mortals . . .
But mortals they are not; it is the condition of all such
descriptions, as they occur throughout the novel, that they lean
on identification with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. And
this is a further dimension of the problem noted above; we as
readers are stranded somewhere between Mount Olympus and
Tin Pan Alley, not knowing at what value to take the claims to
which the narrative is committed. Fortunately for the lovers
themselves (and for their future career), Vina herself has no
such qualms:
From the beginning, Vina accepted Ormus’s prophetic status
without question. He claimed to be the true author of some of the
most celebrated songs of the day, and he did so with such
uncontrolled intensity that she found she had no option but to
believe him. (GBF 93,94)
As we don’t, either, if we wish to continue reading. This is the
nature of the contract that Rushdie requires of us in this novel: a
suspension of disbelief so total, that anything goes; everything
between heaven and hell (that is, on earth) may be reinvented.
Ormus and Vina invent themselves; they are ‘two bespoke
identities, tailored for the wearers by themselves’; we are simply
expected to assist, admiringly, at the ritual. Nor is this the limit
of the provocation. Because in order to maintain his fiction,
Rushdie requires us also to accept, and ‘remember’, an
alternative history of popular music over the last forty years.
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‘It was an amazing proposition: that the music came to Ormus
before it ever visited the Sun Records studio or the Brill Building
or the Cavern Club’ (GBF 95–6).
‘Now my story begins to strain in opposite directions’
confesses Rai at this point, forwards into the fatal relationship
and backwards into Vina’s past in Chickaboom, in small-town
America. She was born during the Second World War, daughter
of a Greek-American called Helen and a ‘sweet-talking Indian’
who abandons the family ‘after Nagasaki’ (wars stalk this Helen
too) and because he had ‘revised his sexual practices’ (GBF 101–
2). Helen is taken up by a kindly American, John Poe, who raises
her family with his own; but the narrative is not kind to him in
return. One day the fated Helen murders him and all the
children except Nessy/Vina, before committing suicide; this
‘because of’ the Vietnam war. Nessy moves, changes her name,
becomes a woman; ‘and wherever she went, there was war. Men
fought over her. In her own way, she was a Helen too’ (GBF
108,110). She is eventually retrieved by her father and packed off
to India, where she arrives primed to play her part in the novel.8
Of course it is a subversive part. ‘She was a rag-bag of selves,
torn fragments of people she might have become’ (GBF 122);
and this wilful admixture, matched with Ormus’s visionary
complex; wrought up by their joint dedication to the love of each
other, and to music, provides the destructive energy that links
their story with the central metaphor of seismic disturbance.
‘Later, entering that world of ruined selves, music’s world, they
will already have learned that such damage is the normal
condition of life, as is the closeness to the crumbling edge, as is
the fissured ground. In that inferno, they will feel at home’ (GBF
148). The first song Ormus writes for Vina is ‘The Ground
Beneath Her Feet’ (GBF 142), the song that haunts the novel. The
full text only appears later still, on page 475, by which time Vina
is dead and Ormus demented; when he admits to Rai that he is
jealous of his dead twin, Gayomart, who communicated the
song in the first place and now enjoys Vina in ‘her underworld,
her other reality’ (GBF 476).9 One surmises that this is the one
lyric quoted in the novel that Rushdie really believes in, the one
that has been successfully grafted from the Orphic root; and it is
no doubt appropriate that this has actually become a song, with
the collaboration of the actual Bono from the real band U2.
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
Rushdie glosses the title of chapter 6, ‘Disorientations’, with
mock etymology as ‘loss of the East’, and the narrative does
begin to shut down its Indian operation here, as Rai’s parents’
‘bitter quarrel’ erupts and their house (Villa Thracia) burns
down (GBF 175,168) – one of several such conflagrations in the
novel; Rushdie is fond of incendiary departures. Their premature deaths will follow shortly (GBF 204,6). Vina leaves,
abruptly; deprived of her, Ormus becomes more and more
dislocated, seeking her substitute frantically in other women
(GBF 175–80). He will leave too, and Rai himself will follow:
Vina was the first of us to do it. Ormus jumped second, and I, as
usual, brought up the rear. And we can argue all night about why,
did we jump or were we pushed, but you can’t deny we all did it. We
three kings of disorient were. (GBF 177)
But the disorientations are more general, and the narrative
struggles to contain them; or is it the reader who is made to
struggle? ‘It was the year of divisions, 1960’:
Everything starts shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated
by frontiers, splitting, re-splitting, coming apart. Centrifugal forces
begin to pull harder than their centripetal opposites. Gravity dies.
People fly off into space. (GBF 163–4)
The seismological metaphor looms larger, becomes more
threatening; in preparation for the real Bombay earthquake of
1971 (GBF 217). Sir Darius goes on about cultural decline;
ironically, before his own humiliation (for claiming fraudulent
legal qualifications) on his last journey to England (GBF 150–4).
And Rai’s representation of Ormus continues on its unrestrained trajectory. ‘What a figure he cut in public! He glittered,
he shone . . . He spread his erotic gospel with a kind of
innocence, a kind of messianic purity’ (181). But the private
Ormus is taking another journey, a more profound disorientation from reality itself; he is coming nearer and nearer to ‘the
dangerous edge of things’ (GBF 181,189).
He no longer spoke much of Gayomart, but I knew his dead twin
was in there, fleeing endlessly down some descending labyrinth of
the mind, at the end of which not only music waited, but also
danger, monsters, death. (GBF 182)
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The historical narrative ‘out there’ also starts to do strange
things. John F. Kennedy has a narrow escape from an
assassination attempt in Dallas in November 1963; one Oswald
is overpowered by ‘a middle-aged amateur cameraman called
Zapruder, who saw the killer’s gun and hit him over the head
with an 8mm cine camera’ (GBF 185). This is Rushdie having
‘fun’ in his parallel world; as we are reminded towards the end
of the novel, ‘the spirals of postmodern irony twist tight and fast’
(GBF 525). But some historical facts remain immutable. The
Indo-Pakistan war still takes place in 1965; though the reference
to Mrs Gandhi’s triumph is another kind of irony, with ‘Geology
as metaphor’ giving us both ‘Mrs Mover-and-Shaker’ and then
‘Dark Rumbles Shake Gandhi Administration’ (203). The allusion to the death of Nehru (in 1964), coincident with the murder
of Darius Cama by his son Cyrus, underlines one consistent
orientation in the novel: that towards death itself. We are never
far from eschatology, Orphism, the four last things. ‘I am writing
here about the end of something’ says Rai; and just before this,
he proposes these conflicting formulae: ‘Death is more than love
or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and
art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it’ (GBF
202–3). Whereas Midnight’s Children was a nativity novel,
celebrating birth itself and the new reality created by the birth
process, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is by contrast a novel half in
love with death; even if the pull towards death is tempered (as it
is in Keats) with the Orphic theme of the immortality conferred
by art. Significantly, Rai is soon to tell us that Vina’s fourth
abortion ‘had left her barren’ (GBF 226), like the dead women in
Calf Island in Grimus; sometimes, the price paid by art is indeed
a high one. Indeed, in human terms the price is everything.
The three chapters (9, 10, and 11) in England are only a
staging-post for Ormus on his way to America. The narrator Rai
somehow disappears from these chapters, leaving the authorial
voice to take over; and the author relishes the opportunity to
indulge some vigorous satire, in the style of The Satanic Verses.
The excesses of contemporary culture are a favourite theme of
Rushdie’s (and of a Rushdie who remains, as his critics
frustratedly observe, unchastened by the flagrant fact of his
own investment in it); and the vagaries of sixties London afford
him plenty of material. But the narrative advances on other
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
fronts. The American owner of a pirate radio station, Mull
Standish (another name purposefully borrowed from Longfellow) is a key figure in the musical culture, who provides
Ormus with his first big recording break; it is he who launches
Ormus and Vina on their career, detonates ‘their almost totemic
celebrity’ (GBF 303). He is also the father of two sons in a
grotesquely dysfunctional family, hated by his ex-wife Antoinette Corinth (lest we miss the point) with a Greek intensity.
‘There will be a tragedy’ we are warned, and indeed there is: she
tries to murder her two sons in a staged road accident, in which
Ormus himself is nearly killed (GBF 298, 307). Ormus’s
prolonged convalescence from his injuries gives time for several
new narrative features: among them, the rivalry for Ormus
between Vina and Maria, a woman who comes unsummoned
from the ‘otherworld’ to minister to him; and the parallel which
is developed between the ‘Ormus absconditus’ of these years
and Rushdie’s own enforced public disappearance after February 1989. It is also during this time in London that Ormus’s
identity starts to fragment, in a movement which parallels that
we have observed all along in Vina. ‘There are too many people
inside Ormus’ (GBF 299); there are also, it must be said, too
many parallels with Gibreel Farishta from The Satanic Verses, as
the paragraph which then follows makes only too obvious.
Their removal to America in chapter 12 (to stay with the
musical metaphor) takes the novel into a new key. But the key
turns out to be visual, as the return of Rai to his narrative duties
brings a return of the visual mode. The deepening divisions in
Ormus’s psyche are now delivered in visual images. He actually
starts to see different worlds in his two eyes, and describes this
phenomenon to Vina as like seeing a movie screen with gashes
in it; and perhaps there is another film showing behind, ‘and
there are people in that movie looking the other way through
the rips and maybe seeing us’ (GBF 347–8).10 Vina asks him if he
hears voices; but no – it was of course Gibreel in the earlier novel
who heard voices. Ormus is a victim of visual hallucinations,
and (in what might do well in a comic strip version of the novel)
decides to wear an eye-patch in defence against them. His
different universes are ‘like parallel bars, or tv channels’; he can
switch between them. ‘All that is solid melts into fucking air.
What am I supposed to do?’ (GBF 349–51). What he does is write
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a song about contradictions, ‘Everything you thought you knew: it’s
not true’ (GBF 353), which doubles as caption to a two-page
journalistic summary of recent historical events.11 Once arrived
they submit to the hospitality of Yul Singh, at whose harbour
house the weekend provides a comic interlude, including
another couple who are ‘an admonitory pair of Vargas
caricatures of themselves’. But by now it’s difficult to tell the
caricature from the real thing. Or Vina from Maria, who has also
made it across the Atlantic: ‘she has become part of his vision, of
his seeing, he can control her appearances’ (GBF 359, 365). But at
the end of this chapter, Ormus in desperation proposes
marriage to Vina; she frivolously says yes – in ten years, and
so for him ten years it is: ‘For ten years, until she is thirty-seven
years old and he is forty-four, he will not touch or be touched by
her body’ (GBF 370). The trouble is, this grand mythic gesture
simply doesn’t fit with the relentless presentation of the
contemporary. After all, Jane Fonda only made Ted Turner wait
six months when he proposed to her straight after her split with
Tom Hayden (and the reference is not unwarranted here, since
Vina’s merchandising best-seller ‘diet book and her health and
fitness regime’ (GBF 394) are later stolen from Jane Fonda
herself).
Reviewing The Ground Beneath Her Feet on its first appearance,
a French critic remarked that America has not been kind to
novelists not born there; somehow, they just don’t get it.12 This
judgement is confirmed by the passage on ‘Sam’s Pleasure
Island’, where Rai/Rushdie’s fascination with the excesses of
New York’s hedonistic lifestyle can only be registered by a
Swiftian, indeed Juvenalian disgust that is imported from
another moral continent.
Here are penis-ironers, testicle-boilers, shit-eaters, penis-boilers,
testicle-eaters. Over there is the world Spermathon Queen, who
encountered one hundred and one men, four at a time, in a non-stop
seven-and-a-half hour megafuck. (GBF 377)
Another feature of the novel’s emigration to America is that it
puts a further strain on the narrative structure. True, Rai
provides the ground of the visual metaphors; but he himself
becomes a much more shadowy figure, in this world of ghosts
and visions; indeed, he becomes a shadow of Ormus himself, a
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kind of substitute, which is underlined by his own love affair
with Vina. ‘I’m his true Other, his living shadow self. I have
shared his girl’. (GBF 386) Especially when we think of the
aspect of parabasis here – the author speaking through his
characters – this sexual blending of the three has something
vaguely incestuous, even onanistic about it (Rai is not associated
with Narcissus for nothing). At this point the novel becomes
homesick and needs a trip to India, which is prompted by the
reappearance of Mull Standish and a contestation with Yul
Singh for a deal with the rock stars. During this episode, India
itself is described as ‘that country without a middle register, that
continuum composed entirely of extremes’ (GBF 416), and one
pauses once again to remark how apposite such a description is
of the novel we are reading; which contains within itself, as it
were, the seeds of its own identity, as well as the terms of a
negative critique.
The eventual marriage of Ormus and Vina, after their ten-year
wait is described via a series of transparent references to John
Lennon and Yoko Ono; and also, with a casualness that amounts
almost to indifference, to the models that should ennoble them:
‘Like mythical lovers, Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice,
Venus and Adonis. Or a modern pair.’ When Rai, their friend
and narrator, and the custodian of their image in the novel, can
add ‘So their wet dreams had got them through ten years’ (GBF
422), we sense not so much a geological as a stylistic fissure
between the novel’s grand design and its verbal execution, page
by page. Rai then remembers himself, and his PR role; ‘Love
made them irresistible, unforgettable . . . When they walked into
rooms, hand in hand and glowing, people fell silent, in awe‘;
and yet, ‘Their music was their real lovemaking’. There is
nothing more to say about them; they have vanished off the
scale of the human. ‘In a way, they had ceased to be real’ (GBF
424–6). This attenuation of reality poses a more general problem
for the novelist; as Rai disarmingly concedes, a little later:
‘Realism isn’t a set of rules, it’s an intention . . . The world isn’t
realistic any more, what are we going to do about that?’ (GBF
449). This must be one of the weaker definitions of realism in the
history of that abused term; disappearing straight into the
intentional fallacy. And the fact that Rushdie is half-quoting a
Norman Mailer quip here does not get him out of the difficulty.
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Nor do the recurrent sections where Rai ‘catches up on’ history
with a journalistic catalogue of events; more ‘current events
collage’ (GBF 439). In Midnight’s Children, one remembers, we
had the image of the ‘chutneyfication of history’ to suggest the
way Rushdie creatively reprocessed real events for the purposes
of his fiction; the dense imagining of the Sundarbans chapter,
for example. But here in The Ground Beneath Her Feet we have
only a thin journalistic wash, where events are sprinkled like
condiments at table, and the novelist’s transformative power is
suggested by such trivial examples as the conflation of Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 to give us Slaughterhouse 22; or by the fact
that Elton John’s song ‘Candle in the Wind’ – already somewhat
scandalously recycled by him for Princess Diana’s funeral – is
then thoroughly pedestrianized as a song by Ormus, ‘There’s a
Candle in my Window’: a song the memory of which is
supposedly ‘pulling at your emotions’ (GBF 373,131).
It is at this point that Rai makes the reckless assertion, ‘The
god of the imagination is the imagination. The law of the
imagination is whatever works . . . the work’s truth, fought for
and won’ (GBF 446). Well, yes; no one would dispute this digest
of romantic theory, with all the authority of Blake and Coleridge
and Yeats behind it. But the assertion risks rebounding on Rai/
Rushdie here, since what may be fought for and won may also
be fumbled and lost. One gets the distinct sense that the author
knows, by this point in the novel, that he has (to use that vulgar
metaphor from fiction) lost the plot, as he relies increasingly on
extra-diegetic assertion rather than demonstration for his claims
to quality and significance. Rai has another go, boxing foolishly
above his weight: ‘Our creations can go the distance with
Creation; more than that, our imagining – our image-making –
is an indispensable part of making real’ (GBF 466).13
The narrative takes its course. We return to the devastation of
the first chapter for Vina’s death, which is finely described in
Rai’s studied cinematic slow-motion. ‘The earth closes over her
body, bites, chews, swallows, and she’s gone.’ The quotation
from King Lear which follows is curious, since one would have
thought Vina, even in death, is at the furthest possible remove
from Cordelia (whose ‘voice was ever soft,/Gentle and low, an
excellent thing in woman’: V iii 274–5). The lines on Eurydice
quoted from Virgil are more appropriate; and then Rai returns
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to his recognizable idiom: ‘the human race offers the earth god
its greatest prize, Vina!!’ (GBF 472; the double exclamation
marks are his own). But whatever rhetorical excess Rai/Rushdie
has practised on us so far, the chapter which follows on from
Vina’s death scales the very heights of hyperbole. And the clue
to this is that Rushdie, writing in the aftermath of the sudden
death of Princess Diana in September 1997 (on which event he
had written an excitable piece in the New Yorker),14 catches onto
the tailwind of this, and fills his phrases with the hysteria. The
two-page ‘statement’ in italic (GBF 478–9) could – does – refer as
much to the dead princess, arrested in all her glamour, as to
Rushdie’s own ‘rock goddess of the golden age’. ‘Dying when
the world shook’, we are assured, ‘by her death she shook the
world’. It is difficult to know how to take the author’s loss of
judgement and control in the pages that follow. Not only are
they extremely tasteless, as Rushdie piratically rewrites the grief
for Diana as the grief for his fictional heroine – it is a kind of
High Plagiarism – but the pitch of the prose is pushed into the
realm of the actually absurd.
The lords of information have been caught napping by the
unexpected gigantism of the death and after-death of Vina Apsara,
but within hours the greatest media operation of the century is
under way . . . Meaning itself is the prize. Overnight, the meaning of
Vina’s death has become the most important subject on earth. Vina
significat humanitatem. (GBF 482)
Light-headed from breathing this thin air, the reader at least
knows he is on the last lap. But at this point, a curious thing
happens; there is a rebalancing of the energies of the novel, a
redirecting of its imaginative power. It is as if Rushdie wrests
back control of the novel from his reckless narrator, Rai, who has
all but run it aground with his coarse humour and his reductive
instincts. And this happens with the introduction of Mira
Celano, who ‘replaces’ Vina as lead singer in the relaunched
VTO band. Because the wayward Rai now falls for Mira, and can
concentrate on contriving his own happy ending; while Ormus
is finally brought to accept the fact of Vina’s death, and prepares
himself, through a purification in music, for his passage to the
real other world. And we ourselves can now follow the ‘forking
path’ to the two interweaved endings, which manage not to
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interfere too much with each other – though Rai’s compulsive
jealousy reminds us to the end of his baser metal.
Let us dispatch Rai first. He and Mira (we note the pun) are
made for each other; they inhabit the same discourse. And Mira
herself knows clearly enough she is only playing a part with
Ormus, through music: ‘I brought him back from Hell but that
doesn’t mean I’ve got to burn in the fire instead’ (GBF 544). Rai
and she become lovers; he meets her daughter Tara (from an
earlier relationship which is lightly sketched in) and the happy
family is all set up. There is a blip as the clay-footed Rai still
manages to be jealous of Mira’s stage performances with Ormus,
but even he fully realizes by the end the qualitative difference
between them:
So I admit also that Ormus’s love for Vina Apsara was greater than
mine, for while I had mourned Vina as I had never mourned any
loss I had, after all, begun to love again. But his was a love which no
other love could replace, and after Vina’s three deaths he had finally
entered his last celibacy, from which only the carnal embrace of
death would set him free. Death was the only lover he would now
accept, the only lover he would share with Vina, because that lover
would reunite them forever, in the wormwood forest of the forever
dead.
For shutterbug Rai, that’s quite a poetic way of putting it;
though he returns to his familiar idiom to describe his own
situation here: ‘I was too stupid to believe it, but at the end of
this long sad-luck saga, I was the jackpot boy’ (GBF 563).
Meanwhile Ormus is able to attend to his own last things. The
success of the relaunched band only serves to detach him more
decisively from the world around him. There is a fleeting birth
image for the band itself (’This is the sound of a baby being born.
This is the rhythm of new life. We’ve got a band’ (GBF 546)), but
this incongruous image does not indicate Ormus’s own
direction. For him, ‘having lost all joy in life he began to look
for death’. Rai has told us that ‘Ormus’s plan is to make the new
show an exploration of the ourworld/otherworld duality with
which he’s wrestled most of his life’ (GBF 557, 547), and here at
last the power of the fiction, in Ormus’s invention of his other
world, becomes real to us; because it balances with and is rooted
in this one.
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Having created his fiction he plunged into it and did not come out
for two years. The fictional universe of the show gave the impression
of floating free of the real world, of being a separate reality that
made contact with the earth every so often, for a night or two at a
time, so that people could visit it and shake their pretty things . . . He
stood on his imagination, on what he had conjured out of nowhere,
what did not, could not, would not exist without him. Now that it
had been made, he existed only within it. Having created this
territory, he trusted no other ground. (GBF 558–9)
The scenario has been prepared for Ormus’s death, and here
again one feels that Rushdie succeeds with his ‘remake’ of John
Lennon’s death by shooting outside his New York apartment.
The ‘tall dark-skinned woman with red hair gathered above her
head like a fountain’ does seem to walk in from another world,
not just the newspaper reports, and the fittingness of this
conclusion – one ending – does seem to justify the means. ‘I
think she came and got him because she knew how much he
wanted to die.’ Not even Rai can reduce this image (GBF 569–
71).
But even the genuine uplift of this ending, where Rushdie’s
vision is allowed to come into its own, does not alter the fact that
The Ground Beneath Her Feet remains a seriously flawed novel;
flawed in its conception, with its meandering creative directions,
its incoherences, and its inconsequential passages; and also in its
execution, with its unfortunate admixture of studio talk and
slangy street-speech (from three cities). And then the novel’s
opportunistic top-dressing – using the hysteria surrounding
Diana’s death as a launch pad – leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
As for the detail of the execution, the actual writing, I have
perhaps said enough already about the delivery of the text,
chapter by chapter; but it may be useful to draw some of these
dispersed observations together.
The first problem is one to which I referred at the beginning of
this chapter, and which has become increasingly apparent in my
commentary on the narrative: namely, the consequences for the
novel of Rushdie’s choice of narrator. It was finding the narrator,
let us remember, that released the genie for Midnight’s Children.
Rushdie entrusted no intermediary with the difficult task of
narrating The Satanic Verses; the complex narrative strategies
could only be carried out by an omniscient and untrammelled
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third person. Moraes Zogoiby serves his own purpose in The
Moor’s Last Sigh, adapting his register from lyric to satiric to
elegiac as required. But here Rushdie has pitched upon a vulgar,
coarse-grained photographer – fresh as he says from ‘pussyheaven’ (GBF 343) – to deliver his story about his larger-than-life
lovers and artists, and the result cannot but be discordant. Either
we have a discourse which comes straight from Hello! magazine
and the latest celebrity hagiography, or we have Rai in more
resentful mood descending to cheap jokes (the ageing Ormus is
‘more hip-replacement than hip’) or scabrous sexual references
(as to Ormus and Vina’s ‘ten years of wet dreams’). In either
case, the effect is horribly reductive, and sells the novel short.
Not only does Rai steal Ormus’s woman, but he almost makes
off with Rushdie’s novel. It is as if Iago were left to be the
narrator of the novel Othello; there would not be much left of the
Othello music either. The form of a play can accommodate such
disjunctions, such a clashing of discourse and perspective (think
of the Porter in Macbeth, or the Fool in King Lear; or of the
contrast, more appositely, between the debased view of
sexuality expressed by Thersites, and the exalted ideas of the
lovers themselves, in Troilus and Cressida). But a novel hardly can,
because so much is in the hands of the narrator. The result for
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a kind of creative equivocation, as
if Rushdie can’t make up his mind which version of the story he
is committed to: the full-blooded, lyrical, mythic and tragic
version, with all the feeling, or the cut-down, cynical, comicstrip version, with all the jokes. No doubt a writer wants to have
it both ways, and one can well believe this was Rushdie’s
intention; but all one can say is that this double perspective
doesn’t work – no more than does Ormus’s double vision, with
the prop of his ridiculous eye-patch.
Another aspect we can usefully consider here – as a further
instance of the author’s symptomatic equivocation – is the way
Rushdie actually allows some significant criticism of his project
to find articulation within the novel itself. Sometimes this can be
picked up from contemptuous references by Rai himself, to the
music scene and its hangers-on. But the developed critique is
supplied by the pair of composite cultural gurus Marco Sangria
and Remy Auxerre, whom Rushdie keeps in the wings for this
purpose. Composite is the right word: Sangria is described as
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Italian-American, and Auxerre (a curious French-theoretical
mixture of Barthes, Baudrillard and Foucault), as Francophone
Martinican. To begin with, Sangria and Auxerre vie with each
other to extol the significance of the singer/songwriter act; Rai
concedes that ‘even by the gushing standards of music journalism . . . Marco and Remy are extreme’ (and we are given extreme
examples to prove it: (GBF 392)). But later, both of them turn
their acerbic analysis against the pair:
To Auxerre and Sangria, they had become little more than signs of
the times, lacking true autonomy, to be decoded according to one’s
own inclination and need. Marco Sangria . . . announced that the
VTO super-phenomenon was now too one-dimensionally overt, too
vulgarly apparent. Their success was therefore a metaphor for the
flatness, the one-dimensionality, of the culture. (GBF 426)
But one is forced to reflect: isn’t Rushdie himself investing in
this very culture? Isn’t the novel we are reading being fed, page
by page, into the same ‘flatness’, the same bewildering
undifferentiation? One might agree that it is astute on the
author’s part to include this criticism, as if it might somehow
‘immunize’ the novel with negative antibodies against more
trenchant criticism coming from outside; but response doesn’t
work like that. We know what we know, and Rushdie has helped
us (like it or not) to express it. To venture a bad pun on a level
with some of his own: you cannot both have your ‘cold soup’
(GBF 504) and heat it. I am uncomfortably aware that I asserted
in the first edition of this work – in the context of The Satanic
Verses – that ‘the only worlds that are seriously called into
question in Rushdie’s fiction are the flattened, value-free world
of contemporary culture’ (see above, page 87). It is a troubling
symptom of the sea-change in Rushdie’s writing, twelve years
on, and the fundamental shift of perspective in his work, that
this confident positive judgement no longer applies. The
tsunami of contemporary culture has swept away such reference
points as there once were.
The presentation of the music itself is a different problem. As
noted above, this is not a matter of the lyrics Ormus and Vina
perform through the novel, many of which are printed in full in
the text – including the lyric ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’,
famously set to music and performed by Bono himself with U2.
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But the novel does not include a CD; there is no ‘surround
sound’; the music is left to Rushdie’s description and to our
imagination. As Rai confesses at one point, ‘to me, set down on
the page without their music, they seem kind of spavined, even
hamstrung’ (GBF 354). This is surely a conclusive argument. And
yet somehow it is assumed ‘[y]ou remember it’ (GBF 55); we are
told that we remember songs that we have never heard, and that
we are moved by the recollection. Now, it is true that Keats
wrote in ‘The Grecian Urn’, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but
those unheard/Are sweeter’; but this was in a poem that
provides, in its verbal structure, an adequate equivalent both
to the urn itself and to the music which is played, unheard, on
its stringless instruments. The music which is played in The
Ground Beneath Her Feet is certainly costlier and intentionally
louder (Ormus has to be protected from the volume in a bubble)
but the writing never manages to mix a fictional skein of sound.
Even at the end when Ormus himself is transported and Mira is
singing and Rai is consumed with jealousy (’Ormus was playing
his guitar as if it were sex itself and Mira was pouring herself
over him like a free drink . . . I had to fucking leave’ (GBF 562)),
the cut-price phrasing leaves us quite indifferent.
We are told, of Ormus and Vina, that their music creates
meaning, that it articulates what it means to be human in our
times (GBF 482). But if there is no music, nothing at the centre
where this ‘meaning’ is supposed to be found, then we are left
with something like Macbeth’s bleak reflections on life itself,
once voided by absence: ‘It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’15 We remember E. M.
Forster’s attempt to describe the effect of listening to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, in Howards End; ‘the music started with a
goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end’,
which impression is then interrupted by ‘elephants dancing’.16
Such attempts are always hazardous; we are not so far here from
the unfortunate visual effects of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. It takes
all the analytical, imaginative, and synthetic skills of a Thomas
Mann to approach the experience of music, as he does in a late
chapter of The Magic Mountain;17 to attempt, as he does there
with infinite patience and delicacy and determination, successfully to describe the subtle links that exist between musical
sound and human feeling; to understand why (as Shakespeare’s
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Benedick puts it), ‘sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s
bodies’.18
A similar argument may be developed on the visual plane,
with respect to Rai’s photography. Whereas in the denser, more
worked world of The Moor’s Last Sigh Rushdie was able to make
much of Aurora’s paintings (as we have seen) by ekphrasis,
weaving them into the narrative texture, creating depth and
emotional colour and generating feeling, Rai’s photographs –
even his supposedly ‘iconic’ photographs of Vina – are never
effectively seen. Which is to say that the visual metaphors on
which such a process would depend never take root in the novel;
the frenetic movement of the all-action narrative never allows
this to happen. It is all very well for a critic to argue, as does
Carmen Concilio in her article on Rushdie’s narrator, that Rai
‘conjugates the complementary roles of narrator and photographer, of an oral art and a visual art’; but the visual can only
be refracted by the verbal, in fiction, through an imaginative
rather than chemical transformation; and this the novel fails to
achieve. Concilio quotes (and seems to endorse) Rai’s claims that
‘a camera can see beyond the surface’, that photography can
give access to ‘the metaphoric beyond the actual’ (GBF 80, 449),
but this is just to repeat what is Rai’s protestation rather than
Rushdie’s performance.19 We can conclude that both the
metaphors of creativity in the novel – the novel as rock music,
and the novel as photograph – founder on the inadequacy of the
verbal medium to authorize or sustain them. For all the
superlatives which are freely dispensed to its characters and
their qualities, and for all the credit which we are expected to
give them, this is a fatal weakness that leaves the novel a series of
unrealized intentions.
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10
Three Novels for the
New Millennium
Quite apart from the constraints of space dictated for a work in
this series, there are several reasons for writing about Rushdie’s
three most recent novels in a single chapter. First of all, these
novels are inevitably linked by their historical moment: as
millennial optimism is shattered by the attacks in New York of
September 2001, and we have the subsequent – ongoing – ’war
on terror’, with its attendant exacerbation of sectarian hostility
and mistrust worldwide; as we see the loosening of some ties,
and the establishment of others, with progressive globalization;
the shifts of economic power and the realignment of other
power bases on the planet, underlined by the credit crisis of
autumn 2008; this in turn entailing the rise in food prices, which
provides the context for the ‘Arab revolution’ (or the ‘Arab
spring’) across north Africa in 2011. These forces are at work,
implicitly and explicitly, in the novels we are to review here.
And in the case of Rushdie, with the Indian subcontinent still
looming large in his work, we have to add the terrorist attack on
Mumbai in June 2008 by an Islamist group based in Pakistan,
which caused serious destabilization between the two countries;
and also the shooting dead of Osama bin Laden by American
forces on Pakistani territory in May 2011. This latter event
prompted a combative intervention by Rushdie in the online
press, where he argued that unless Pakistan could provide an
adequate explanation for the five-year presence of bin Laden
and his entourage in a fortified residence near Islamabad, ‘then
perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel
it from the comity of nations’.1
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But the feature which I think really identifies these later
novels (and I include The Ground Beneath Her Feet retrospectively
in this), is what I would describe as a thinning out of the verbal
texture. It is as if Rushdie has developed a kind of shorthand, a
technique of passing more rapidly and cursorily over events,
dealing with ideas also in a more perfunctory manner (as if to
say we have, and we know we have, been here before), and
conceiving of characters in bold – or indistinct – outline, rather
than in sympathetic or engaging depth. Of course it may be
argued that this is deliberate; such a skimming shorthand is best
suited to our superficial times, and there is no point looking for
depth in a depthless world. But even as such a parallel is
proposed, we know it to be specious. It is the hollow argument
firmly castigated by Yvor Winters years ago, as ‘the fallacy of
imitative form’. Sir Epicure Mammon is spectacularly superficial,
but Ben Jonson cuts the verbal section deep to let him strut and
fret his hour on the stage. Not many of Proust’s characters are
noted for their profundity, but Proust still puts them through his
slow and patient process of verbal creation. What we are talking
about here is the danger of distraction; anecdotalized and
mediatized distraction from what criticism used to invoke as ‘the
actual quality of experience’. Once a novelist lets this quality slip
through his fingers, the fictional fabric becomes attenuated,
uninteresting. And this is immediately perceptible in the use of
language.
I would like to focus on one feature here: Rushdie’s
(increasing) use of what I referred to earlier in this study as
the ‘narrative superlative’. Of course this has always been a
feature of his style, and magic realist style generally. (It also can
be traced back to Dickens.) But may one not ask, in the end, does
not the author protest too much? Cannot some woman,
somewhere, be just beautiful (or ugly), rather than the most
beautiful (or ugliest) woman in the world? Cannot some man be
more or less in love, rather than torn up by the roots and
devastated by passion? Another man moderately talented,
averagely intelligent, occasionally brave, conventionally loyal?
Isn’t there a law of diminishing returns with such rhetoric, as
the gesture ‘claims’, verbally, what nothing in the narrative can
possibly corroborate or sustain? What the reader neither believes
in nor cares about? We end up with a devalued verbal currency
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which is only able to deal in extremes, extreme qualities and
their diametric opposites. Because Rushdie’s fiction habitually
generates these extreme pairings as well, which revolve about
each other like two stars in an alien universe.
Creativity involves the manipulation of a rich and varied
resource, not the permanent creaming off of the top layer. The
obvious danger of doing everything on the high wire is that the
referential function of language, which requires an immersion
in the real world, becomes nullified, inverted, and turns instead
– this is the natural revenge of an abused medium – into parody.
The temptation to self-parody in Rushdie’s writing has often
been noted; it has even been suggested that he breathes the air
of self-parody quite comfortably at these exalted altitudes, and
that once the convention has been recognized and accepted the
reader has nothing to lose. But this is another specious
argument. The writer-on-stilts (W. B. Yeats once declared,
‘Malachi Stiltjack am I’) loses the sensitivity and subtlety that
can only be retained by contact with the common ground of
discourse (Seamus Heaney’s earth-bound Antaeus, rather).
It is a frustrating state of affairs for the long-time admirer of
Rushdie’s writing that he seems so willing to underplay his own
gift, and sell himself and the reader short. Valentine Cunningham remarks in a review on the ‘magnificent riffs’ in Fury, and he
is right to do so.2 In all of Rushdie’s novels, whatever their
vagaries and inconsistencies, there are magnificent passages (a
paragraph, a page, several pages) which have the stamp of his
imaginative and linguistic mastery. But then the pressure gauge
falls again, and we find ourselves running on economy setting,
with the worn-out gestures from the familiar toolbox of tricks. In
the great, commanding novels, Midnight’s Children and The Satanic
Verses, there is a scale and scope, a coherence of vision, which
keeps the reader enthralled, surprised and entranced as the
narrative does its work on him. We know, infallibly, that we are
discovering something ‘rich and strange’, something new in the
world, that we are sharing with the author in a profound and
moving voyage of discovery. Whereas in the later novels – from
The Ground Beneath Her Feet on – what we have only too often is
more of a demonstration; not a voyage, but a tourist trip, with a
guide who is evidently an expert in his field but seems curiously
absent, disengaged. The tension and the expectation have
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somehow evaporated; we know we have seen it all done better,
by the same person, before. But let us take confidence from the
fact that the admixture is still there; the real Rushdie can still be
glimpsed, behind his stand-in simulacra; and it is in the hope of
finding him that we will embark on these three later novels.
FURY
Fury, published just weeks before the fatal date of 11 September
2001, is the most personal and the most intimately detailed of
Rushdie’s novels. The central character Malik Solanka is
Rushdie’s age (at the time), and answers to his physical
description; he was born in Bombay, educated at King’s College
Cambridge and worked in the media before becoming a wildly
successful . . . dollmaker. ‘Salman’ may even be recovered anagrammatically from his name (although it is unlikely that the
complete anagram ‘lika Salman OK’ is intentional). There are
tense relationships with ex-wives, and the pain of a severed
relationship with a young son – the treatment of which, one has
to say, drifts dangerously towards sentimentality. There is the
recent move to New York, and the encounter with Neela
Mahendra, ‘the most beautiful Indian woman – the most
beautiful woman – he had ever seen’ (F. 61), who coincides with
the dedicatee of the novel, and Rushdie’s future fourth wife,
Padma Lakshmi. A Rushdie novel, like a beehive, always has a
queen; and once she has displaced the prefiguring Mila Milo,
Padma/Neela is the undisputed queen of Fury; even assuming
the role of one of the Furies themselves, before she sacrifices
herself (and the new relationship) to a misdirected political
cause. There are even well-known features from Rushdie’s social
life, such as his notorious argumentativeness; and a public
attempt at vicarious expiation for this, in ‘The Collected
Apologies of Malik Solanka’ (anybody who has ever been
offended by the author could well start here). At one moment,
Solanka is struck by the discourse of a loud-mouthed New York
taxi-driver, and Rushdie writes: ‘Solanka recognized himself in
the foolish young Ali Majnu’ (F. 67) and indeed, one can read
the novel – as many unsympathetic critics have done – as a
sustained exercise in self-exposure. 3
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And yet. Though all this is true, it is also true that Rushdie
looks beyond simple identification (which would soon be
exhausted in the telling) and uses the exacerbated consciousness
of his dollmaking double to make what develops into a
devastating and in the end unpitying analysis of the complacent
strategies of the self; one is not spared by the satire, or protected
by the sentimentality here. It is not surprising that these
passages occur not in ‘domestic’ New York (where the plot
involving the sexually motivated murders of three young
women is patent top-dressing, borrowed from Kubrick’s film
Eyes Wide Shut – which is mentioned, along with many other
films, in the text (F. 203))4 but in the free-floating, fantasy world
of Lilliput-Blefuscu, where Rushdie has to rely on his own
imagination to keep the story going. And the imagination, once
left to its own devices, tends to cut through the outer
integuments, leading us into the claustrophobic circle of the
self, where our weaknesses are mercilessly exposed. We are
beyond autobiography here, and those critics who have accused
Rushdie of self-indulgence in this context have simply stopped
short of an intelligent reading. (Sarah Brouillette by contrast
suggests that ‘the novel’s more significant solipsism is its
paranoia about the way mass media make cultural products
available for highly politicized forms of appropriation or
interpretation that betray the controlling intentions of their
authors’, and this takes the argument in another direction.)5
The personal trap has been primed by Solanka’s own creative
success. His second series of dolls – the pretentious ‘Puppet
Kings’ – has become so big, so ubiquitous in the American media
that the characters/cyborgs cross over into real life and intervene
in the political struggle in Lilliput-Blefuscu. This, with its
announced Swiftian pedigree, is a fictional island functioning
as a kind of post-colonial composite in the South Seas,
constructed with the (then) recent history of Fiji in mind. Neela
Mahendra has gone there, to support a would-be revolutionary
named Babu, and Solanka makes the journey in pursuit of her.
But by the time he arrives, Babu has turned into a kind of toy
despot to whom Neela is enslaved; and Solanka is shut in a cell
where he befouls himself. The process of humiliation is only
beginning, and the passage that follows is excavated from deep
in the damned self.
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It was hard not to fall into solipsism, hard not to see these
degradations as a punishment for a clumsy, hurtful life. LilliputBlefuscu had reinvented itself in his image. Its streets were his
biography, patrolled by figments of his imagination and altered
versions of people he had known . . . The masks of his life circled him
sternly, judging him. He closed his eyes and the masks were still
there, whirling. He bowed his head before their verdict. He had
wished to be a good man, to lead a good man’s life, but the truth was
he hadn’t been able to hack it. As Eleanor had said, he had betrayed
those whose only crime was to have loved him. When he had
attempted to retreat from his darker self, the self of his dangerous
fury, hoping to overcome his faults by a process of renunciation, of
giving up, he had merely fallen into new, more grievous error.
Seeking his redemption in creation, offering up an imagined world,
he had seen its denizens move out into the world and grow
monstrous; and the greatest monster of them all wore his own guilty
face. (F. 245–6)
This is to jump into the deep end of the novel; but I think it is
useful to do so, since the depth that Rushdie offers us here takes
the form of an intense critique of the creative faculty itself,
which cannot fail to hold our attention. This I believe is the true
‘ground’ of the novel, its submerged subject, waiting (like the
fabled Kraken) to be brought to the surface; and it is well to be
reassured of the ultimate seriousness of the quest before
retracing our steps to see just how the irritable dollmaker has
been brought to this pass, to this moment of clear and
uncompromising vision. We can then re-examine this vision,
as it deserves, more thoroughly, which will take us into the very
heart of Rushdie’s long-term fictional enterprise.
The real quest in this novel, then, a quest in which Malik
Solanka is driven by Furies he can no longer contain, is not for
some cybernetic fictional utopia,6 and still less for the life in the
United States for which Salman Rushdie himself has apparently
settled. Both of these directions are abandoned in the novel
itself. The quest is for the discovery of the self, or rather for the
‘unselfing of the self’ (F. 79), as Solanka seeks, through a painful
process of confession and expiation, to recognize and admit to
the kind of person he is, the forces that drive him, and the
experiences which have made him so. It is the latest in the line of
pilgrimages which Rushdie designs for his central characters,
and which I have treated as such in this book. This time it
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involves not only the physical pilgrimage, first to ‘real’ America
and then to imagined Lilliput-Blefuscu, but also the difficult
psychological journey into the processes of the creative
imagination itself; a theme which has preoccupied Rushdie
throughout his writing career, and which receives in Fury its
most persistent and unsparing analysis.
But we must first attend to Solanka’s social self, before
exploring this other dimension. The revelation of this self
requires first the resurfacing of memories (what Solanka calls
‘the back-story’), and this process is delineated very persuasively
in the novel, as from his uncomfortable cockpit in New York
(where he is persecuted outdoors by the city’s unrelenting noise
and indoors by his Polish cleaning lady) Solanka introduces us
first to his second wife Eleanor, their child Asmaan, and his doll
‘Little Brain’, whose mediatized success is the mainspring of the
plot. He then goes further back to his Cambridge days, with
more detail of his obsession with dolls, and early defining
friendships; this in turn leading on to recollections of his first
wife Sara Lear, with her abandoned thesis on Joyce and the
nouveau roman and her rooted hatred of her husband’s dolls.
Further anecdotes from his past surface at intervals, but it is not
until Part Two (95) that we get more detail concerning the
reasons for Solanka’s sudden flight from his wife and child in
London, as told to a new woman friend Mila Milo. This has
involved a battle between the doll and the child, and especially
when we recall Rushdie’s frequent quotation from W. B. Yeats
this opposition between artistic activity and the responsibilities
of ordinary life irresistibly calls to mind his poem ‘The Dolls’7 –
which might even have played some part in the gestation of the
novel. (The fact that Mila Milo herself then takes on the qualities
of a doll presents a further complication.)
It is not until he has met Neela Mahendra that Solanka has the
courage to recall his very earliest memories: the destruction of
his childhood happiness by his parents’ separation, and the
sexual molestation by his stepfather, a trauma which, we finally
understand, fuels the fury that the adult visits compulsively on
his world: and which, significantly, has dolls at its centre, ‘the
dolls who crowded round him in bed, like guardian angels, like
blood kin: the only family he could bring himself to trust’ (F.
223). But even before he tracks it to its source in his own
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damaged life, Solanka realizes that this very turbulent complex
of feelings is responsible for the best as well as the worst in our
natures. This reflection occurs after a terminal argument with
his first wife:
Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical,
brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of
furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also
violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction . . . (F. 30–1)
For Solanka, it is the creation of his dolls that best defines his
personality, and it is this fact that has produced his wife’s outburst.
‘Your trouble is . . . that you’re really only in love with those fucking
dolls. The world in inanimate miniature is just about all you can
handle. The world you can make, unmake and manipulate, filled
with women who don’t answer back’ (30). The creation of the dolls
is a metaphor, in Fury, for creativity in whatever form; the
voluntary intervention of the self and its motives in the larger
processes that contain it, what is described elsewhere as the
imposition of culture on nature, cybernetics on biology.
And so the novel follows the career of ‘Little Brain’ on two
planes; one external, charting the detail of the doll’s exponential
media success, with the ineluctable commercialization of her
character as product (Solanka has no control over this, and
indeed laments it: now, ‘he hated Little Brain’ (F. 100), but still
shamefacedly pockets the royalties); and the second internal, as
the index of Solanka’s progressive moral isolation, and deepening guilt – the negative effects of his creativity – are borne in
upon him. He is like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, except that
instead of the albatross that the mariner has killed, he has the
doll that he has given life tied round his neck; or like the
fanatical Frankenstein, who comes to repent of the monster
whom he has given life. What Solanka is brought to realize is
that the same voluntariness that went into the creation of his
dolls has leaked into the management of his human relationships, especially those with women; he has no defence against
the charge of manipulation. His incapacity here may be
understood as part of a generalized breakdown in trust between
men and women: ‘Between the sexes the trouble was worst of
all’; but this affords scant consolation. The fact that Mila Milo is
instrumental too (’I renovate people’, she says (F. 115, 118)) only
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sentences them to a mutually destructive encounter.
Their relationship is symptomatic. When this lovely greeneyed girl introduces herself as a fan of Little Brain, Solanka is
delighted; and he soon begins to ‘allow himself to see her as his
creation’ (F. 124), she becomes for him simply another doll. But
unbeknown to him, Mila has a lurid back-story involving an
incestuous relationship with her widowed (writer) father, which
has given her a sinister power and project of her own; and so
she and Solanka fantasize each other, creating a guilt-ridden
masturbatory complicity. Mila Milo is a vampire, a Lamia; she
feeds off the same voracious fury as his own. It is significant that
out of this complicity comes Solanka’s idea for ‘The Puppet
Kings’, his ‘Empire of the Dolls’ that will put even Little Brain in
the shade; and the fact that Mila becomes the producer of this
show only underlines the perversity of the enterprise.
By this time however Neela Mahendra is waiting in the wings
(the Mila/Neela name-game is a typical Rushdie device), and she
saves Solanka from being engulfed sexually by Mila. Rushdie’s
lightly fictionalized ‘love letter’ to Padma/Neela extends over the
next couple of chapters, and the author’s exhibition of his
‘trophy’ is rather embarrassing; but this is only a self-indulgent
distraction from the fulfilment of Solanka’s sentence. Because
even Neela cannot save him from himself, and his fatal
investment in the Puppet Kings. She is caught up in the
ensuing narrative from one side (through her personal involvement with Lilliput-Blefuscu), he from the other, through his
manipulation of (and by) the fiction. Because it is a central
proposition, by this stage, that Solanka has lost control of the
fiction, as he has lost control of his own life; mazed in his
imagination, and with no moral or ethical guidance, he has lost
the capacity to distinguish between the two. And it is the
complicated vortex of adventures in the Rijk civilization that
lead Solanka to the solitary cell where we found him at the
beginning of this chapter. And where we can resume our
examination of the central theme of the novel, what Dr Johnson
identified a couple of centuries ago as ‘that hunger of
imagination which preys incessantly upon life.’8
As Solanka engages with his Puppet Kings, in what Mila Milo
calls ‘serious play’, he finds that his ‘imagined world engaged
him more and more’;
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Fiction had him in its grip . . . He, who had been so dubious about the
coming of the new electronic world, was swept off his feet by the
possibilities offered by the new technology, with its formal
preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear
progression, a bias that had already bred in its users a greater
interest in variation than in chronology . . . Links were electronic now,
not narrative. Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized,
an exact mirror of the divine experience of time. (F. 186–7)
The phrase ‘fiction had him in its grip’ recalls exactly the phrase
from the minatory story ‘At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers’,
which I have commented on in an earlier chapter (pages 103–4).
‘In fiction’s grip’, we were warned there, ‘we may mortgage our
homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave’, or
alternatively, ‘in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away
from our desires’, withdrawing into contemplation of ourselves
and the world. Solanka does neither of these things, exactly, but
his investment in his fictions leads him by other routes to a
profound insight into the paralysing ambivalence and equivocalness of the free-wheeling imagination. ‘[E]ntranced by the
shadow-play possibilities’ of his doubled and reversible virtual
world, he experiences ‘the dissolution of the frontiers between
the categories’ of reality, that is to say all categories that would
maintain a secure foothold in experience. And such an experience
takes us inevitably on the route to the dissolution of the self, the
self as discriminating moral being. The vertiginous appeal of
ambivalence leads him to another unsettling question: ‘How far,
in the pursuit of the right, could we go before we crossed a line,
arrived at the antipodes of ourselves, and became wrong?’ (F. 187–
8). This is very close to Swift’s formulation from A Tale of a Tub,
cited on the first page of this study, where Swift’s reckless author
claims that the imagination is capable of leading us ‘into both
extreams of High and Low, of Good and Evil’, an experiment of
which the consequences cannot be foretold; and as we know,
Rushdie has already conducted a full-blown version of the
experiment in The Satanic Verses. Solanka himself pursues the
experiment here in a shorthand form, via the opposition between
his Puppet Kings and their rivals the Baburians, who have ‘a long
dispute . . . on the nature of life itself – life as created by biological
act, and life as brought into being by the imagination and skill of
the living’ (F. 188).
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An earlier rumination, on the condition of life in America, has
led Solanka to recognize our human investment in mutability.
‘But our nature is our nature and uncertainty is at the heart of
what we are . . . nothing is written in stone, everything crumbles . . . all that is solid melts into air’, a realization that comes in
the form of a half-quotation from Prospero’s famous summary of
being at the brink:
Our revels now are ended; these our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air . . .
(The Tempest IV 1 148–50)
It is this very ‘brinkmanship’ that makes us susceptible to
fiction; just as our cellular structure is transforming us physically
moment by moment, so we are always in movement, mentally,
between our sense of ourselves as we are in the world and what
we might become. And it only takes a certain pull or pressure, a
release of energy, to put this process into overdrive. This is what
Mila Milo provides; ‘Mila as Fury, the world-swallower, the self
as pure transformative energy’. She it is who recruits Solanka, as
she tells him, for the ‘fight to the death between the counterfeit
and the real’, she who sets him loose in ‘the laws of your
imagined universe’ (F. 177–8). And so by the end of the novel,
we can say it is not so much the man as the ‘maker’ who has
been on trial, and if he has mismanaged his life, it is precisely
through what he has made – in it and of it, forgetting to
distinguish between the dialectical, relational approach to truth
and the imposition of one’s own truth on the order of the
human. As we have seen, technology represents an hubristic
temptation here at least as perilous for Dr Solanka as were Dr
Faustus’s magic spells.
From this point, having written the most intense and
revealing scene in the novel, Rushdie can only provide an exit
strategy, some kind of salvage operation. Rather as in the old
suspense series (on the radio or in cinema shorts), Solanka
escapes redoubtably from his self-made fictional trap; but of
course Neela has to be sacrificed in the operation. (This is no
James Bond film, after all; nor is one invited to think what Mila
and Co must think of all this, back at the production desk.) All
that remains for Solanka is to abandon his failed New York
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experiment and go back to London and to his son Asmaan; with
whom there is a richly sentimental ending set up on the bouncy
castle. If not exactly a castle in the air, this is a castle outside of
time, and well defended against Solanka’s own disturbing
memories; here, for a moment, father and son are allowed to
share the as-yet-uncontaminated eternity of childhood.
SHALIMAR THE CLOWN
Especially after the switchback ride of Fury, with its plunge
through levels of reality and its teasing intersection with details
of the author’s life, Shalimar the Clown returns to a more
recognizable fictional formula for Rushdie, with a mixture of
myth, magic, documentary record and historical concoction
(including imaginary conversations with historical figures)
served up with some postmodern panache in order to portray
the ‘rape of Kashmir’ in the second half of the twentieth
century. It is a downbeat novel for a terminal time; as a main
character reflects in the last pages, ‘The century was ending,
badly, of course . . . like the whole goddamn millennium’ (SC
395). The mood is fatalistic, weighed down by the future;
tolerant and sunlit Kashmir – only fleetingly invoked here – is
entering a time where ‘all certainty was lost, and the darkening
began, ushering in the time of horrors’ (SC 82).
Partition, parturition. It is not their fault that the two starcrossed lovers in the story, Shalimar and Boonyi, are born in the
village of Pachigam on the same day in divisive 1947, not so
much handcuffed to history as pilloried by it, and play out in
their doomed and demented relationship all the violence and
hatred of the times. They are not just star-crossed either, but
stars-and-stripes crossed, as the person who later steals Boonyi
from Shalimar is none other than the American ambassador,
visiting Kashmir for the first time in the troubled 1960s (’America
didn’t know what to do about India’ (SC 178)). And this provides
another pull from outside which helps destroy the harmony of
the high mountains (an image formed as such in Rushdie’s
childhood, when the family took their holidays with the
grandparents in Kashmir; the grandparents who are the
dedicatees of the novel). This overlaying of ancient Kashmir
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with modern America allows Rushdie to juxtapose a world of
wooden huts and tents and the first TV in town with the world
of luxury apartments, Bentleys and TV studios; and the further
flashback to Max Ophuls’ past in war-torn Europe links the Nazi
experiment and the concentration camps to the madrasa, the
terrorist training camps across the Kashmiri border. The leaps of
ten and twenty years in the narrative do create some problems
of continuity, coherence (’And all of a sudden he was forty years
old, battle hardened’ (SC 274) is how Rushdie transports
Shalimar into the 1980s); and geographically, it is remarkable
that a novel inspired by the towering Himalayas should begin
and end claustrophobically in a Los Angeles bedroom; the first
time with a dream of Kashmir, ‘like paradise . . . in a time before
memory’ (SC 4), and second time with a living nightmare
resurfaced from the fouling of that paradise.
The sad fact (for the reader) is that Rushdie’s own imagination
seems to get caught in the downward spiral he is narrating, and
though his heart may be in Kashmir it is never invested in this
narrative. The devil is in the detail, and the demons get into the
ink here; the writing is frequently slack and formulaic, even
perfunctory, as if the author just wants to get it over with.
‘Imagine it yourself’ we are told at one point; ‘What happened
that day in Pachigam need not be set down here in full detail,
because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all
there is to it’ (SC 309). This is not normally part of a novelist’s
contract with his reader; we expect to be accompanied with
more patience and pertinacity, even on fiction’s darker pages;
and the lists of atrocities (with dates supplied) that we get
elsewhere do not fulfil the function any better. It is almost as if
the author has contracted the anamnesia of his Indian colonel
Hammirdev, who is afflicted by this mental disorder which
allows a person to remember everything but without the
capacity to understand or communicate it.
Rushdie organizes this material with a classic modernist timescheme, beginning (almost) at the end with the murder of Max
Ophuls by Shalimar and then going back to provide all the
relevant (and less relevant) antecedent detail, in three long
chapters, before returning in the last chapter to the dramatic
culmination of the story. In order to provide a commentary here
I will ‘flatten out’ this scheme, not oblivious of the fact that
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Rushdie relies for many of his effects on the familiar proleptic
gesture (Shalimar is referred to as ‘the assassin’ from his
innocent youth, and Boonyi we are told would die before her
time, etc). The unavoidable future is always looming oppressively over people who are simply trying to live their ordinary
lives. Not only that, but several of the older Kashmiri women
have the gift of second sight, foreseeing a future so bleak that
they dare not even articulate it: ‘’’The age of prophecy is at an
end,’’ Nazarébaddoor whispered, ‘‘because what’s coming is so
terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it’’’ (SC
68). But nevertheless, this is the story that Rushdie has engaged
to tell us. And so: in a paradisal Kashmiri village named
Pachigam, washed by the waters of the Muskadoon, inhabited
by families of circus people (one stop from Dickens) and genial
cooks, Hindu and Muslim have lived in harmony for generations. Here, a young Muslim boy named Shalimar, son of the
village headman Abdullah Noman, star of the circus for his
tightrope walking (and who is of course ‘the most beautiful boy
in the world’ (SC 54)) falls in love with the Hindu girl Boonyi
Kaul, dancer and daughter of pandit Pyarelal Kaul; and she
more than willingly accepts his advances. We don’t need to have
read the epigraph to know that this is a Romeo and Juliet
situation; however, the difference is that the tolerant community
of Pachigam accepts and indeed promotes the match, which
seems to confirm their neighbourliness.
‘We are all brothers and sisters here,’ said Abdullah. ‘There is no
Hindu-Muslim issue. Two Kashmiri – two Pachigami – youngsters
wish to marry, that’s all. A love match is acceptable to both families
and so a marriage there will be; both Hindu and Muslim customs
will be observed.’ Pyarelal added, when his turn came, ‘To defend
their love is to defend what is best in ourselves.’ (SC 110)
But we are not taken in; the epigraph Rushdie has chosen is
actually Mercutio’s curse: A plague on both your houses. We know
that the stakes here are too high. The girl Boonyi turns out to be
trouble: more Cressida than Juliet, in fact. Even before her
marriage she has caught the eye of the formidable Colonel
Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha of the Indian army, whom
she has dangerously offended by telling him (in whatever words
this would actually have been said) to ‘Fuck off’; whereupon he
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resolves, ‘Pachigam would suffer for Boonyi Kaul’s insulting
behaviour’ (SC 101). It is actually Boonyi’s friend Zoon Misri
who suffers first, raped by the three Gegroo brothers, ‘a trio of
disaffected, layabout young rodents’ (SC 126) who then take
refuge in the mosque. Undermining the hopes of both Abdullah
and Pyarelal, this rape is of course across the religious divide,
and coincides with the 1965 war between India and Pakistan
over Kashmir; which may last only 25 days but leaves behind
‘peace with more hatred, peace with greater embitterment,
peace with deeper mutual contempt’ (SC 129). It is not long after
this that Boonyi dances for the visiting American ambassador,
Max Ophuls, setting up her own seduction and a scandalous
public relationship with this fifty-year-old married man, which
destroys the peace of Pachigam long before its physical
destruction. And that peace, as so often in Rushdie, was
maintained by stories.
Abdullah Noman’s memory was a library of tales, fabulous and
inexhaustible, and whenever he finished one the children would
scream for more . . . Every family in Pachigam had its store of such
narratives, and because all the stories of all the families were told to
all the children it was as though everyone belonged to everyone
else. That was the magic circle which had been broken forever when
Boonyi ran away to Delhi to become the American ambassador’s
whore. (SC 236)
It is also the decisive moment that drives her deserted husband,
Shalimar the clown, into what he welcomes as ‘the world of
men’ (SC 251), turning him into a terrorist and assassin.
But the treatment of Boonyi and Shalimar in the chapters that
follow undermines the narrative, suggesting as it does a serious
misjudgement on Rushdie’s part – a loss of control over the tone,
and flow of sympathy – which risks alienating the reader. Let us
take the case of Boonyi first. No sooner is she established as ‘the
American ambassador’s whore’ (this we notice is the narrator’s
word) in Delhi, than she begins to degenerate physically, and
with startling speed. ‘She became addicted to chewing tobacco’,
and a houseboy ‘led Boonyi deeper into the psychotropical
jungle, teaching her about afim: opium . . . But her narcotic of
choice turned out to be food . . . If her world would not expand,
her body could. She took to gluttony with the same bottomless
enthusiasm she had once had for sex . . . She ate seven times a
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day’. It is curious, to say the least, that Rushdie seems to think
the situation calls for comedy – and comedy which travesties his
own serious themes:
Her appetite had grown to subcontinental size. It crossed all
frontiers of language and custom. She was vegetarian and
nonvegetarian, fish- and meat-eating, Hindu, Christian and Muslim,
a democratic, secularist omnivore. (SC 201–2)
The pitiless dismantling of the dancing-girl continues: ‘Inevitably her beauty dimmed. Her hair lost its lustre, her skin
coarsened, her teeth rotted, her body odour soured, and her
bulk . . . increased steadily, week by week, day by day, almost
hour by hour’ (SC 203). It is an extraordinary tableau, most
resembling one of Swift’s late misogynist poems, such as ‘The
Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’. The portrait of Boonyi is
positively vindictive, and one is left to wonder what is the source
or purpose of this vindictiveness, which exceeds even the
requirements of the heavily-symbolic plot. One can only
conclude that there is an element of Rushdie’s own misogyny
released here (like the deadly Bhopal gas cloud), the same the
author was charged with after the publication of Shame; the
novel which Shalimar most resembles, in this respect and others.
Of course the ambassador soon abandons his bad bargain; but
by this time the devious Boonyi is pregnant, and finds herself
delivered of a daughter she names Kashmira in an orphanage
for street girls. The baby girl is then taken from her by the
embittered wife of the ambassador (who actually identifies
herself as Rumpelstiltskin; the fairy-tale element is also present
here, if in one of its more malignant manifestations). The abused
Boonyi is returned to Pachigam, where she discovers she has
been formally declared dead by her friends and family; it only
remains for her to live out her frugal years in a hut above the
village like her own ghost, waiting for her husband to fulfil his
vow of revenge. When Ursula K. Guin writes that Rushdie is
‘never unkind to his female characters’,9 she must have
forgotten poor Boonyi, laid down under her layers of fat, frozen
in the snow, starved in her hut, slaughtered, and her corpse
eventually made to stand for ‘the putrescent, flyblown reality of
the world’ (SC 366). Thomas Hardy was kinder to his fallen
woman Tess; but then he only had Victorian morality to contend
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with, not the questionable and contorted gender politics of our
own enlightened times.
The novel is at one level less cruel to Shalimar himself, in that
he is allowed more human dignity; but he turns out to be a
clown nevertheless, in the disparaging sense of the term as well;
he has no will, intelligence, or character, all his actions being
rigidly determined by the plot – which requires as much: the
iron mullah tells the terrorist recruits, ‘human nature was an
illusion also, and human desires and human intelligence,
human character and human will’ (SC 266); there is not much
left for fiction to work on. We are assured that Shalimar had the
‘sweetest and gentlest nature of any person in Pachigam’, but
this means strictly nothing, because immediately after he has
made love with Boonyi for the first time the atmosphere of
violence is ventriloquized upon him in this way: ‘Don’t leave me
now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill
you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the
children also’ (SC 61). Rushdie has confessed in interview that
he always has problems with his plots,10 but this is surely a
desperate manoeuvre. And his character puts up little resistance: ‘Shalimar the clown had stopped loving Boonyi the
instant he learned of her infidelity, stopped dead like an
unplugged automaton, and the immense crater left behind by
the destruction of that love had at once been filled by a sea of
bile-yellow hatred’ (SC 236). This novel is certainly better at
hatred and violence than at peace and love, and Shalimar is in
this sense a worthy recruit. As he is the perfect recruit in the
training camp run by the iron mullah, Bulbul Fakh. ‘Before he
was ready to embark on the great work in hand his consciousness had to be altered . . . Everything they thought they knew
about the nature of reality, about how things worked and what
things were, was wrong, the iron mullah said.’ ‘The new recruits
listening to the iron mullah felt their old lives shrivel in the
flame of his certainty’ (SC 265–6). Shalimar is carried off by this
ideological avalanche, surrendering everything except his
hatred, which he still keeps to himself; and it overlaps so
conveniently with the mullah’s teachings. Boonyi, in her
mountain hut, knows telepathically what is happening: ‘she
knew only that the old Shalimar was dead. In his place, bearing his
name, was this new creature, bathed in strangeness, and all that was left
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of Shalimar the clown was a murderous desire’ (SC 273). The lovers
are simply helpless indices of what is happening in the world at
large; ‘An age of fury was dawning and only the enraged could
shape it’ (SC 272). Revisiting the title and keyword from his
previous novel, Rushdie certainly seems to qualify as one of the
shapers. In the last chapter of the novel, when Shalimar is under
sentence of death in St Quentin prison for the murder of Max
(having already fulfilled his vow by killing Boonyi), an attorney
lodges an appeal based on the argument that his client’s ‘free
will was subverted by mind-control techniques’, that he was ‘a
death zombie, programmed to kill’ (SC 383). If so, it was
Rushdie’s iron plot that got to him, even before the iron mullah
did.
Whatever may be argued about the author’s attempt to link
the personal and the political in this novel, no service is done on
either plane by such flagrant (and explicit) manipulation. As we
will see, even the elusive Max Ophuls is caught by the end in
the same trap. It is presumably in order to probe the
implications of American foreign policy in South Asia in the
1960s, as represented by this unlikely ambassador, that Rushdie
tracks Ophuls back to his privileged childhood in the city of
Strasbourg, ‘in a family of highly cultured Ashkenazi Jews’. This
gives him the opportunity to sketch in the nineteen-thirties,
when ‘history stopped being theoretical and musty and became
personal and malodorous instead’ (SC 137–8), especially for
Ophuls’ mild-mannered parents, who die in the camps as a
result of Nazi medical experiments: ‘They never made it to the
gas chamber. Scholarship killed them first’ (SC 157). The section
which describes young Max’s adventures in the Resistance in
France are almost extraneous to the novel, except insofar as they
serve as his very flamboyant farewell to Europe – and allow
Rushdie to enjoy himself, rather recklessly, and in a very
different narrative style. Within twenty pages, Max becomes an
expert forger of documents (’he felt he was also forging a new
self’ (SC 148)), learns to fly, and becomes ‘one of the great
romantic heroes of the Resistance: the Flying Jew’, after an
improbable escapade with a rare Bugatti aeroplane – whereupon
the ‘ungenerous reader’ is warned against confusing this story
with that of Antoine de St Exupéry (SC 155, 160);11 seduces
German spies to order (’perhaps the greatest contribution Max
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Ophuls made to the Resistance was sexual’ (SC 163)); and finally
makes a ‘run’ to Britain with fellow resister ‘Grey Rat’ Peggy
Rhodes, who will become his disappointing but useful wife:
‘The run was successful: terrifying, with close shaves so bizarre
as to feel almost fictional, but they made it’ (SC 169). This
represents a close shave with novelistic decorum, as well. In
London he incurs the dislike of General de Gaulle (a less
difficult proposition one imagines than some of his other
exploits), before deciding to move to New York, ‘where the
Ophulses began their American married life’ (SC 174). And
where the American political plot clicks into action.
For the purposes of perspective, Rushdie frequently quotes
from Max’s later ‘memoir’, and one such recollection refers back
to his wartime forging of documents, ‘the creation of false
identities. ‘‘The reinvention of the self, that classic American
theme . . . began for me in the nightmare of old Europe’s
conquest by evil. That the self can be remade is a dangerous,
narcotic discovery’’’ (SC 162). And it is this same education
which leads Ophuls first into an academic career, and then into
the US diplomatic service; in which elevated capacity we meet
up with him again in India. By this time he, and his America,
have long surrendered resistance for complicity, and idealism
for self-interest; and all of this we are meant to read into the
squalid sequence which follows. But nevertheless, it suggests a
remarkable realignment, a change not just of gear but of vehicle,
for Rushdie to let Max be perceived by his daughter Kashmira,
after his death, as ‘the occult servant of American geopolitical
interest . . . the invisible robotic servant of his adopted country’s
overweening amoral might’. The robot Max and the zombie
Shalimar are well matched, as representatives of their respective
political systems; and as Kashmira herself reflects here, perhaps
justice had after all been ‘done to Max’ for ‘his unknown unlisted
unseen crimes of power’ (SC 335–6).
Whether justice has been done to Kashmir – or to the category
of fiction about such things – is another matter. This reader finds
the attempt to be bungled. If ‘America did not know what to do
about India’, nor in this novel does Rushdie himself know what
to do with his feelings about Kashmir. Serious negotiations are
reduced to a farce of acronyms; atrocities are framed as statistics,
or used as the basis for rhetorical riffs: the ‘Why was that?’
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sequence, and the ‘Who did this?’ sequence (SC 296, 308). When
the Gegroo brothers are finally hunted down by her father,
twenty years later, for their rape of Zoon Misri, their deaths are
narrated as a cartoon animation; and when the iron mullah
meets his fate, the description comes straight out of Dickens.
‘Inside the garments of Maulana Bulbul Fakh no human body
was discovered. However, a substantial quantity of disassembled
machine parts was found, pulverized beyond hope of repair’ (SC
298, 316). And for the last scene, the structurally determined
one-to-one confrontation between Shalimar and Kashmira,
Rushdie switches disconcertingly to a full-blown cinematic
narrative style. The assassin prowling in the dark, the resolute
quarry with her night-vision goggles, the tension that is wound
up (with Kashmira’s archaic bow) and never quite released, are
borrowed from a recognizable film genre that cannot pretend to
provide a plausible or satisfying conclusion to a novel; least of all
to one conceived with the pretensions to scale, and seriousness,
of Shalimar the Clown.
THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE
Rushdie announced in an address to the University of Turin, in
1999, giving a clue to his ‘unwritten future’, that ‘I have for a
long time been engaged and fascinated by the Florence of the
High Renaissance in general, and by the character of Niccolò
Machiavelli in particular’ (SAL 76). There is a further clue in a
passage from the rock music novel published that same year,
where the narrator Rai exhibits a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the musical entertainment of that period (GBF 54–8);
and again in Fury, where the beleaguered Malik Solanka tries to
sell to a sceptical studio his idea of a ‘claymation life of Niccolò
Machiavelli’ and ‘the golden age of Florence’ (F. 101).12 So we
should not perhaps be surprised that when The Enchantress of
Florence appeared in 2008, it featured a bibliography of 85 items
and 8 websites, which still represent (the author insists) ‘not a
complete list of the works I have consulted’. So we can certainly
not accuse Rushdie of skimping his homework. For good
measure, the front endpapers of the book reproduce a detail
from the building of the Fatehpur Sikri Palace, in the V&A, and
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the back endpapers a beautiful panorama of Florence from the
Carta della Catena, in the Museo di Firenze Com’era. And the
novel is indeed a tale of two cities; the fleeting eastern city of
Sikri, with its godlike emperor, exercising absolute power over
life and death, and the western city of Florence, more solidly
realized in its river, its streets, bridges and squares; and
especially in the behaviour of its rulers and citizens in the early
sixteenth century: ‘the drink-sodden daily life and sex-crazed
nocturnal culture’, ‘the excessive hedonistic celebrations for
which the city was renowned’ (EF 200, 273).
Part of Rushdie’s project is to bring these two distant cities
together, by means of travellers and travellers’ tales; love-lorn
travellers and tales of sexual intrigue, so that they may end up as
mirror images of each other – the mirror serving as a significant
metaphor throughout the narrative. The action of the novel is
conducted, therefore, at one remove (or at several removes), by
the telling of tales, interruptive and interlocking tales which
create a narrative structure of great complexity, which demands
unusual attentiveness on the part of the reader. This is no ‘pageturner’; miss so much as a paragraph and you are likely to find
yourself adrift in somebody else’s dream. In this floating world,
the same character goes by several different names and is
perceived in different terms by different people; dreams
intersect with realities; alliances and oppositions form and
reform, fuelled by the uncontrollable force of love and hatred.
Though we are somewhere in the early sixteenth century, actual
dates are few and far between, and recapitulative and proleptic
gestures create a kind of narrative vertigo. So we must pick our
way carefully over the stepping-stones provided.
We can begin with the childhood friendship of three
Florentine boys, Ago Vespucci (cousin of the famous Amerigo),
Niccolò il Machia (the fictionalized Machiavelli) and the rootless
Arcalia (whose name is taken, significantly, from Rushdie’s
reading of Italian romantic-epic poetry). Like most boys of their
time – of all times?–they are obsessed by sexuality, and one of
their objectives is to locate the mandrake root which will, they
hope, give them magical power over women. This episode is
often recalled in their revisiting of the past; it functions as a
reference point or refrain. Arcalia it is who breaks the triangle,
and launches the narrative proper, by deciding at an early age to
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go to sea and seek his fortune in the service of the Genoese
admiral Andrea Doria. Rushdie’s research enables him to give a
convincing account of maritime action in the Mediterranean of
the time, in consequence of which Arcalia finds himself
captured by the Turks. But this captivity allows him to shine
in the service of the sultan (service which includes cutting off
the head of Vlad the Impaler), and Arcalia is given a new name
and a new identity as Argalia of the Enchanted Lance; in which
role, and as lover of the mysterious Mughal princess Qara Köz,
he makes a fair challenge to be the hero of the novel.
Back in Florence, Ago and Il Machia hear nothing of Arcalia
for twenty years, until a French woman, Angélique (nicknamed
‘The Memory Palace’) arrives at a brothel in a petrified
condition, and under Il Machia’s caresses tells Argalia’s tale.
The pages relating this episode are strangely moving; Rushdie
has struck a rich vein here, as often when he explores the
workings of memory. When she has discharged this function,
her memory comes full circle; and assailed by the recollection of
her own capture and rape, she commits suicide by leaping
through a window. Il Machia regards Argalia’s service with the
Turk as a betrayal, as becomes clear when the former friends
meet later in Florence. All this the reader gleans from the overarching tale in the novel, which is the tale told by the traveller
whom we meet in the first chapter (and who runs through
several names before settling on Mogor dell’Amore) to the
Mughal emperor Akbar. Mogor is under a dual compulsion: one
the impulse within him, which obliges him (like the Ancient
Mariner) to tell his tale, and the second from without, the
instruction of the emperor, to whose presence he gained access
in the first place by promising a wondrous tale; a tale which
undertakes to prove by the end that the said Mogor, narrator, is
no other than the emperor’s nephew. Needless to say, the
emperor and his sceptical entourage are ready to exact the
ultimate penalty if Mogor’s tale falls flat, or fails to convince. Not
since Scheherazade has a narrator been so put upon – a parallel
which is implicitly alluded to.
The curious Akbar is sympathetic to Mogor’s project, remarking perceptively at one point that ‘he wants to step into the tale
he is telling and begin a new life inside it’ (EF 203). The tale is
therefore an exemplary metaphor of the universal process of
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self-creation, delineated with unusual lucidity (’he was not only
himself but a performance of himself’ (EF 6)).13 Finding oneself
anonymous – or with a sheaf of names – in an alien culture, one
simply has to self-invent; and Mogor dell’Amore, an emissary of
love, carries the clue to himself in the love story of those whom
he believes to be his parents. It is part of the (rewarding)
intricacy of Rushdie’s narrative that as Mogor proceeds with his
story at the Mughal court, Akbar’s mother and his aunt
occasionally intervene to question or confirm or elaborate
certain details, even revealing some things that have been kept
– like the ‘hidden princess’ – from the emperor himself; and so
the story is convincingly constructed, like tapestry, by several
hands.
Back in the narrated story, Argalia’s reward for another battle
won (this time against the Shah of Persia, enemy of Akbar’s
ancestor) is the sight of his captive, the princess Qara Köz; and
the language of medieval romance is immediately allowed to
take over.
The princess Qara Köz turned to face him, making no attempt to
shield the nakedness of her features from his gaze, and from that
moment on they could only see each other and were lost to the rest
of the world. (EF 223)
Jane Austen we know parodied such stuff in her early novels (’no
sooner did I first behold him, than I felt that on him the
happiness or Misery of my future Life must depend’),14 but
Rushdie has always been prepared to run with the romantic hare
and hunt with the rational hounds, and so the discourses are
allowed to jostle and accommodate each other – as they do not
always, in the Aladdin’s cave of the author’s stylistic transformations. Somehow the theme of geographical juxtapositioning
makes it work. The rest of the world however remains turbulent,
refusing to leave the lovers to enjoy their idyll, and Argalia has to
return to Italy, where he is more than happy to display his prize;
as is Rushdie to write about the travelling circus of the beautiful
Qara Köz and the dazzling companion who is known as her
Mirror. (This is Aladdin in the narrative superlative; and any
reader of Fury will recognize that the princess is Padma/Neela in
another manifestation). Andrea Doria’s man Ceva is the first to
clap eyes on Argalia and his women:
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. . . standing beside him, appearing to draw all sunlight towards
themselves so that the rest of the world seemed dark and cold, were
the two most beautiful women Ceva had ever seen, their beauty
unveiled for all to behold, their loose black locks blowing like the
tresses of goddesses in the breeze. (EF 230)
Gaglioffo the woodcutter is allowed to be more down-to-earth:
‘When you lay your eye on the pair of witches the desire to fuck
them comes upon you like swine-fever’ (EF 239). The Mughal
princess troubles Giuliano de Medici himself, as she appears in
the magic mirror that displays to the reigning Duke of Florence
‘the image of the most desirable woman in the world’ (EF 267);
and poor Ago Vespucci, hopelessly desirous of several women of
the town, has suddenly to revise his standards,
because the women coming down towards him were more beautiful
than beauty itself, so beautiful that they redefined the term, and
banished what men had previously thought beautiful into the ranks
of dull ordinariness. A fragrance preceded them down the stairs and
wrapped itself around his heart.
He exclaims involuntarily, ‘I think I just discovered the meaning
of human life’ (EF 260). The appearance of Qara Köz among the
impressionable Florentines soon starts a cult; ‘the time of the
ammaliatrice began’ (EF 268). People fall to their knees at the sight
of her, miracles are claimed (EF 272, 278). Within moments of
her coming she had been taken to the city’s heart as its special
face, its new symbol of itself, the incarnation in human form of
that unsurpassable loveliness which the city itself possessed.
Argalia can even argue politically that she ‘comes here of her
own free will, in the hope of forging a union between the great
cultures of Europe and the East’ (EF 275–6). ‘It was the bright
time of the enchantress.’ This is the novel’s apogee, in Qara
Köz’s entitlement; and it is a relief that Rushdie sets aside his
flashing superlatives for a moment to observe, ‘The truth was
that Qara Köz was overdoing it’: one has to say, not unlike her
author (EF 281). The mood then changes. We have already been
told: ‘But the darkness would come soon enough’ (EF 278). The
darkness comes in the form of Lorenzo de Medici, who lusts
after Qara Köz and plots against Argalia in order to possess her;
cynically observing to the cornered princess, when he does so,
‘You know how the world works’. When Lorenzo dies of syphilis
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shortly afterwards she falls under suspicion, and the world turns
against her (’What a short journey from enchantress to witch’
(EF 293, 297)), and with the death of Argalia himself, through the
treachery of one of his followers, she only escapes from Florence
– and into a fanciful future – thanks to the faithful offices of his
friend Ago Vespucci.
This sets up the last and longest chapter, where the egregious
Mogor strains Akbar’s (and the reader’s) suspension of disbelief
with the last loops of his story of the fugitive princess; though
the emperor plunges even more irrevocably in love with her
fleeing image. Where is Qara Köz to go, with the Mediterranean
infested with pirates to the east? To the New World, suggests
Andrea Doria, putting in a last appearance as a distinguished
old man of the sea; where he also is moved to fall to his knees
before her, seeing in her the figure of Christ in Gethsemane (EF
334). And so she ‘begins her journey westwards’ (a quotation
from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ that Rushdie does not employ);
accompanied by the cousin of Amerigo himself, she and her
Mirror go to America. Here (continues Mogor, unabashed), in
this as-yet-uninvented continent, time is ‘completely out of
control’ and other taboos are strangely suspended (EF 328),
which is convenient enough for the events which are supposed
to follow. A daughter is born – not to Qara Köz herself, but to
her Mirror (‘We are yours’, she had after all said to her
companion Ago). That daughter then conceives of her father a
son; and that son – mistaking his mother – is the very Mogor
dell’Amore who, travelling back some fifty years later from the
new world to the old, has been telling us this story. Not
surprisingly, Akbar does not quite believe it; palace plots hatch
during his hesitation, and Mogor has to beat a hasty retreat –
with his inevitable ladies – as the city of Sikri dries up and dies
around them. But the last scene is managed by the ghost of Qara
Köz herself, reigning unchallenged in Akbar’s imagination; ‘she
had crossed the liquid years and returned to command his
dreams . . . his godlike, omnipotent fancy’ (EF 349).
In one sense, then, we can say that the declared project of the
novel is a failure. East returns to the imaginative east where it
originated, and west remains west with all its rational limitations. Worse still, just before Qara Köz’s final appearance, Akbar
has a bleak vision of the future which allows Rushdie to visit our
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own time, plunging mythic time back (or forwards) into history.
The future would not be what he had hoped for, but a dry hostile
antagonistic place where people would survive as best they could
and hate their neighbours and smash their places of worship and kill
one another once again in the renewed heat of the great quarrel he
had sought to end for ever, the quarrel over God. (EF 347)
Even Akbar’s erotic dreams are small compensation for this. But
it is the art of storytelling that counts in fiction, not the delivery
of some abstractable moral or symmetrical conclusion; and here
one can surely say that Rushdie’s precarious narrative project
has worked successfully. The complex narrative is anchored to
the moment when we are introduced to the three Florentine
boys: ‘In the beginning there were three friends’ (EF 134); the
formula is repeated like a refrain through the novel, putting
down the roots of reference and memory without which such a
narrative could not cohere (it is significant that the last time we
hear the refrain it is used by Akbar himself, caught up as he is in
the trance of Mogor’s story (EF 339)). And so the web is wound
out from Florence, and wound in in Sikri, with the magical
strand that floats in also from the new world. The beginning in
medias res, with Mogor trying out his tale on Hauksbank’s ship,
the digressions, the seductive dreams and the fencing with the
future are all part of the act, the dextrous performance that wins
Rushdie his ‘silver medal’ (after Sterne’s gold), for ‘keeping all
tight together in the reader’s fancy’.15
Rushdie makes no attempt to disguise the fact that this novel
is a very literary exercise, emerging from his reading of Italian
romantic epic as well as Florentine history; and it is intriguing,
in this connection, that two of the main characters are as it were
re-assumed into literature at the end. As Qara Köz sets out on
her last journey to the new world, Andrea Doria thinks of her as
‘entering the book, moving out of the world of earth, air, and
water and entering a universe of paper and ink’; and likewise
when ‘Niccolò Vespucci the Mughal of love was gone for good’
from Sikri, his story having been concluded, he is located in that
intriguing somewhere between the categories, having ‘crossed
over into the empty page after the last page, beyond the
illuminated borders of the existing world’ (EF 334, 343).
It is even possible for us, by looking over Akbar’s shoulder, to
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intercept one of those intriguing novelistic side-glances, where
as the emperor confesses his shifting reactions to Mogor’s tale,
we can glean some idea of the novelist’s view of his own
performance:
The emperor had experienced many feelings concerning this
individual: amusement, interest, disappointment, disillusion, surprise, amazement, fascination, irritation, pleasure, perplexity, suspicion, affection, boredom, and increasingly, it was necessary to admit
it, fondness and admiration. (EF 311)
It is for each reader to decide how many of these reactions they
experience in reading Rushdie’s novel; but it does at least
provide us with a useful list of boxes to tick. The character of
Rushdie’s disreputable narrator even affords us another insight,
into the need to narrate; the very human impulse to tell stories.
Akbar, we are told early on, has ‘dreamed up’ his non-existent
queen Jodha ‘in the way that lonely children dream up
imaginary friends’ (EF 27); the impulse explored by Beckett in
his short but influential novel Company. And Akbar maintains
this relationship until Qara Köz displaces her at the end –
providing, incidentally, some of the novel’s most entertaining,
light-fingered touches. But Mogor has to create a whole world
around him wherever he goes and convince people of its
existence. The most memorable image of this condition occurs
shortly after his arrival in Sikri, when after falling unconscious
as he embarks upon his dangerous story, Mogor is confined in
one of Akbar’s dungeons.
In the dark of the dungeon his chains weighed on him like his
unfinished story . . . He would die without finishing his story . . . all
men needed to hear their stories told . . . The dungeon did not
understand the idea of a story. The dungeon was static, eternal,
black, and a story needed motion and time and light . . . He felt his
story slipping away from him. (EF 91)
Not only does this recall analogous scenes in other novels by
Rushdie – Solanka shut in the cell of himself in Fury, Moor Vasco
Miranda’s captive in Spain, compelled to compose the narrative
we are reading – but it also brings to mind the author’s own
observation, in an interview, about how the traveller, the
migrant, the pilgrim, must reinvent himself at every landfall,
simply in order to survive:
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I’ve always had the sense that people like me who arrive as strangers
in other parts of the world more or less literally have to make up the
ground we stand on . . . we have to imagine the world into being
around ourselves because nothing can be taken for granted . . . So,
voyaging, migration, whatever you want to call it, is a creative act. 16
The novelist, of course, counts on more than simple survival; the
world he imagines is offered, like a gift, in exchange for what he
receives. This is an idea to which I shall return in my Conclusion.
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11
Conclusion
In the Conclusion to the first edition of this book I invoked the
idea of Salman Rushdie as a ‘pilgrim of the imagination’,
contrasting the commitments of fiction to other kinds of
commitment in the world. I reproduce one page of this
argument here.
But the engagement of fiction belongs to another order – to our
imaginative conditioning rather than to our actual conditions, to
what Shelley called ‘the primary laws of our nature’ rather than to
the law of the land (or the laws of another land). And here Rushdie’s
accomplishment is both more perplexing and more profound, and of
more enduring value. In everything he has written, from Grimus to
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie has explored on our behalf the hazards
of being human, the limits of our human nature, as far as fiction can
fathom it; and then beyond, into the intimations that lie beyond
story itself in the very ground of our mental activity, among the
archetypal prefigurings of being.
As Ayesha led her pilgrims to Mecca, through the waters of the
Arabian Sea (was it to death, or resurrection?), we should perhaps
regard Salman Rushdie himself as a pilgrim of the imagination, and
reach each of his novels as a stage in that pilgrimage. Flapping Eagle
is a pilgrim through the levels of reality he encounters on Calf
Island; Saleem Sinai leads the imaginative pilgrimage of the
midnight children into modern India; Omar Khayyam Shakil is a
peripheral pilgrim on the penitential journey of Pakistan. The Satanic
Verses is an over-determined pilgrimage: from the vision of the
founding of Islam to the literal pilgrimage of Ayesha, from the freefall metamorphosis ‘even unto death’ of Gibreel Farishta to the
painful process of personal change that has to be endured by Saladin
Chamcha before he can return to life, everything in this novel
confirms that the transformation of life can be achieved only through
travail. In the same spirit, Haroun takes his father on the healing
voyage to the spring of storytelling. Rushdie’s short stories involve
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several pilgrims, from Columbus as pilgrim-in-waiting in Spain to
modern migrants making (or failing to make) their difficult way in
different corners of the world. And Moraes Zogoiby, as we have
seen, makes the reverse pilgrimage to that of Columbus, in search of
his mother – from the real corruption of modern India to the fabled
possibilities of medieval Spain.
By forcing the evidence a bit, one can continue this argument to
include Rushdie’s later novels, which have been the subject of
the last two chapters. Ormus Cama does make a kind of
pilgrimage to Europe and America, and even thinks of himself
and the other passengers on his flight to England as ‘the Pilgrim
Children’: ‘Welcome aboard the Mayflower, he greets them,
seizing their hands as they pass his seat’ (GBF 250–1).1 But
Ormus is more travelling Messiah than anyone’s disciple, with
his image of America pre-packaged; and so this particular
continuity breaks down; and one can hardly recognize the
essentially opportunist narrator Rai as a pilgrim, either. I have
already remarked how Malik Solanka, by contrast, can be seen as
a very plausible pilgrim to the new world, and even thinks of his
own saving adventure as such; though he is indeed a pilgrim
travelling first class and with plenty of ill-will in his baggage.
One draws a complete blank with Shalimar in this respect; Max
Ophuls the ambassador is no kind of pilgrim (on the original
Mayflower, he would surely have walked the plank) and Shalimar
the assassin, with his mind closed to everything but murder,
certainly doesn’t qualify. There is an obvious candidate for
pilgrim in The Enchantress, that is to say Mogor dell’Amore
himself, who has made the reverse journey (like Moraes
Zogoiby) from the new world to the old, to convince that world
about his parentage; so let us include him in the list.
But what of the faculty of imagination itself, through which
these ‘pilgrims’ were to discover the larger, more complex truths
about themselves and the world? And here I need to take up the
argument posed in the Introduction to this work, and encountered in differing terms – but always with a central role – in each
of the novels. Because just as the imagination is the clue to our
freedom and therefore to our humanity, for this very reason its
function is equivocal, standing like a luminous but ambiguous
signpost at the various forking paths of our lives. The imagination
can be identified with our free will, our voluntariness, the energy
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with which we confront our experience: to whatever effect or
consequence. And what explains the apparent moral neutrality of
this function is that such effects and consequences are precisely
not contained within our intentions; so the same motive or
impulse can turn out positively in one case and negatively in
another. We are creatures of circumstance, and our limited range
of choices does not in itself determine our contribution, or even
the nature of it, in human affairs.
This bewildering, even demoralizing fact is part of the
novelist’s art (and privilege) to interrogate; and we can see how,
time and again, Rushdie places his characters in situations of
precarious ambiguity. Gibreel Farishta experiences this ambiguity
as a threat, and reacts punitively; in his developing paranoia he is
even prepared to say, ‘if I was God I’d cut the imagination right
out of people’ (SV 122). The imagination creates too much of a
risk; just as we have also been told, ‘fictions are dangerous’.
Moraes Zogoiby lives out the contradictions and reversals in his
own life more patiently, in the case of his deception by both his
parents and his lover Uma Sarasvati; his only too willing and cooperative imagination has not been able to protect him from fatal
errors of judgement in each circumstance. Morally, he is left with
some kind of uncertainty principle; and the fact that he ‘dies into
his tale,’ telling it on his own tombstone (the ending is itself
ambiguous and has been differently interpreted) reinscribes this
uncertainty in the art of storytelling itself.
But what seems to happen in Rushdie’s later work, in line
with the general cultivation of the spectacular and the superficial, is that the imagination is treated as more of a toy than a
moral quality; something than can be played with and then put
away in its box, but which has lost its Shelleyan seriousness. We
have seen how in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the principal
characters have, like the demented Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, ‘kicked . . . loose of the earth’2 (though Vina is eventually to be engulfed by it); their extravagant, unbridled
imaginations have led them beyond the realm of the recognizably human; and Rai is no Marlow, to provide a gravitational
pull the other way. Indeed, the reckless assertions of Rai/
Rushdie, such as that ‘the god of the imagination is the
imagination’, show that the author is actually complicit in the
elevation. Rai at one point even reflects, ‘if we could cut
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ourselves loose, then so could everything else, so could events in
space and time and description and fact, so could reality itself’:
nothing more irresponsible in a writer than this, to suggest that
reality is some kind of game, a take-it-or-leave-it, double-or-quits
gamble. With which Ormus of course concurs; ‘If things get
much worse the entire fabric of reality could collapse’ (GBF 343,
347).3 But not, surely, the stock market?
It does seem to be the case that in Fury, Solanka/Rushdie is
made to do penance (like the humbled poet in Tennyson’s ‘Palace
of Art’) for his pretensions; but even so, as we have seen, a large
part of the novel is devoted to illustrating and developing those
pretensions, and so the evidence here is at best equivocal.
Shalimar represents a different kind of imaginative failure, where
the novelist under-reaches rather than over-reaches himself,
allowing his fiction to become buried in unleavened historical
detail. The insufferable Max Ophuls even delivers a stern lecture
to his daughter India/Kashmira on the dangers of (film) fiction
which seems to underpin this defeated aesthetic: ‘Be so
good . . . as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. . . . understand,
please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.’ Her
obedient reaction to this is ‘a new-found reverence for the British
documentarists John Grierson and Jill Craigie’, and a ‘determination to turn away from the dangers of the imagination and make a
career in the world of the nonfictional’ (SC 352–3). One may read
this as an oblique apology on Rushdie’s part for the failure of his
own fictional mechanisms in the novel. But finally, in The
Enchantress, we can say that the imagination is salvaged, if not
entirely vindicated. The narrative here, as I have argued above, is
beautifully constructed, and this allows Rushdie actually to
achieve effects only gestured at in the preceding novels. Mogor
is a truly captivating narrator, and the curious and tolerant Akbar
his ideal auditor; this exchange gives us an illustration of what
the novel should be able to offer us – when ‘the entire fabric of
reality’ does not depend on the throw of a dice. And in this latest
novel, whose historical setting makes it proof against the
numbing noise, the jostling names, the journalistic inventories
and the visual distractions of the twenty-first century, Rushdie
seems to have rediscovered some of the innocence, and the
delight, of storytelling. It is almost as if he has himself made the
journey, with Haroun, to its healing springs.
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A BRIEF LOOK AT LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE
The mention of Haroun turns our attention, finally, to the
companion novel that Rushdie published in 2010 for his second
son Milan, Luka and the Fire of Life. And one would like to
continue with the upbeat note of the last paragraph, to complete
our survey; but for all the good intention that this novel for
children and adults must have issued from, it sadly lacks both
the fire and the life Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The two are set
up in direct comparison by Rushdie himself, because the Luka
of the new story is actually Haroun’s kid brother; we revisit here
the household of the ‘Shah of Blah’ Rashid Khalifa and his longsuffering wife Soraya, as the fictive family faces up to a new
problem. With Haroun we remember (and if not, we are
reminded) that it was the Sea of Stories that was becoming
corrupt and the battle was with the formidable Khattam-Shud
for the survival of fiction itself; a bracing theme, which brought
out all Rushdie’s inventiveness. But this time it is Luka’s father
Rashid himself who is the problem; he has fallen asleep and
can’t be woken, and the sinister figure of Nobodaddy sidles up
as a kind of angel of death, waiting for his moment. Only if Luka
can bring back the Fire of Life from the Magical World will the
Shah of Blah be saved.
There is inevitably a certain awkwardness here, as Rashid/
Rushdie becomes if not the active hero then at least the ‘sleeping
hero’ of his story, and poor Luka has the unenviable role of PR
for his father. The Magical World, he boasts, has been ‘made
available to the general public by Rashid Khalifa in many
celebrated tales’; it is, insists Luka to the Old Man of the River,
‘the one my father created’ (LFL 9, 54). Luka is sustained moment by
moment on his quest by ‘his father’s voice’ (one cannot but think
of the famous HMV icon), by ‘my father’s endless supply of
bedtime stories’ (LFL 153–5). ‘Luka remembered his father’s
words’ and again, ‘Luka remembered his big brother Haroun’
(LFL 161–2); so much so, that his own adventure reads like some
kind of hand-me-down. At the crisis of the quest, when Luka
has to defend the Magical World against the superannuated
gods, he stands again four-square behind his father.
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You see, I know something you don’t about this World of Magic . . . it
isn’t your World! It doesn’t even belong to the Aalim, whoever they
are, wherever they might be lurking right now. This is my father’s
World. I’m sure there are other other Magic Worlds dreamed up by
other people, Wonderlands and Narnias and Middle-Earths and
whatnot . . . but this one, gods and goddesses, ogres and bats,
monsters and slimy things, is the World of Rashid Khalifa, the
well-known Ocean of Notions, the fabulous Shah of Blah. (LFL 180)
Luka has earlier got one over the Old Man of the River with
Oedipus’s answer to the Sphinx’s riddle (LFL 57), but one
reflects that young Luka is soon going to have to confront
Oedipus’s own more problematic dilemma, as he fights to
extricate himself from Freud’s famous Family Romance.
It’s curious that Luka should even claim the ‘gods and
goddesses’ for Rashid Khalifa here, because in fact one of the
things that weighs this story down is that rather than invent (as
he did in Haroun, which was animated by original characters
and contraptions of Heath Robinson singularity) Rushdie
imports a whole pantheon of these superannuated deities,
‘Egyptian, Assyrian, Norse, Greek, Roman, Aztec, Inca and the
rest’, to the point where Luka himself cries ‘Stop, please stop’ as
he is assailed with yet another list (LFL 169, 205). It’s a wonder
that Soraya’s magic carpet (surely, another threadbare device)
can take off at all. Some of the goddesses while away their time
here with the age-old competition, challenging the mirror on the
wall as to who is the loveliest of them all, and there are the
predictable sulks and scenes. I have to confess that when
reading this I seemed to hear another overriding voice,
participant in another competition, asking: ‘Mirror, mirror, on
the wall,/Who is the novelist of them all?’ and found myself
distinctly reluctant to come up with the expected answer. This
sombre, solipsist, and second-hand tale does nothing new for
Rushdie’s readers, of whatever age.
But there is one last, intriguing idea that might inflect this
view. In the very first chapter, Luka discovers his own magical
power by putting a curse on Captain Aag’s tyrannical circus:
‘May your animals stop obeying your command and your rings
of fire eat up your stupid tent.’ Miraculously, these words prove
effective (‘Luka’s words were still out there in the air, doing
their secret business’) and next day, when Grandmaster Flame
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(the same Captain Aag) cracks his whip and gives his orders, the
animals rebel:
when he saw all the animals beginning to walk calmly and slowly
towards him, in step, as if they were an army, closing in on him from
all directions until they formed an animal circle of rage, his nerve
cracked and he fell to his knees, weeping and whimpering and
begging for his life. (LFL 3–4)
It impossible to read these pages in 2011 without thinking about
the momentous events since spring this year in the Arab world;
the ‘days of rage’ that have toppled tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt
and Libya, and gone some way to achieve the same objective in
Syria, the Yemen, and Bahrain. One cannot resist the thought
that this is Rashid Khalifa up to his prophetic tricks again; in
which case, though some of Luka is hard (or at least slow) going,
we do after all have something to thank Rushdie and his MilanMuse for.
LAST WORDS ON RUSHDIE CRITICISM
It is inevitable with a writer of Rushdie’s visibility – and
productivity: nine big novels, two children’s books and a
collection of short stories, besides all the extraneous material –
that the criticism of his work will be both very extensive, and also
various, representing a multiplicity of views and purposes. I do
not pretend to offer more than a bird’s eye view here, as some
kind of commentary perhaps on the Select Bibliography, which is
intended to serve as a guide for the reader into other directions.
One can begin by suggesting that in general there are three layers
or levels of criticism, which interact between them to create a
prevailing view. First (in time) there are the reviews of novels in
newspapers and journals, now readily accessible in most cases,
and to most readers, via an online archive. These I compare to the
second hand (of an analogue watch), busily ticking away and
suggesting ideas that may or may not catch on and be developed
in public opinion. As we know, and as is certainly the case with
Rushdie, these reviews can veer between the overgenerous and
the vindictive; but a sampling of several will tend to sort out the
eccentric and help to keep the critical discourse on an even keel.
Then we have the articles in learned journals. These are the
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minute hand of criticism, marking a more gradual evolution in
the consideration of a writer’s work; looking for parallels,
influences, contexts; proposing new perspectives; sometimes
(though this is less typical) attending to the intimate detail and
the formal intricacy of this work or that. Here, often, we notice
that personal response and ready valuation are as it were
suspended, in the interests of objectivity or scholarly enquiry. The
journal article is nothing if not serious. Finally we have the books;
and I count about thirty books so far devoted exclusively to
Rushdie’s work, with more than twice that number that contain
chapters or significant sections on it. These are the hour hand of
criticism, which tries to review and argue different positions in
order to arrive at a measured judgement, taking everything as far
as possible into account. These books will argue contrary things,
but we should be able by consulting them to distinguish between
what solid sense and evidence can supply and what derives from
wit and whimsicality.
The impression I have received from reviewing some of the
criticism of Rushdie from each of these levels is that whereas the
contexts and preconditions of his work have been very well and
illuminatingly interrogated – the postmodern, the postcolonial,
the migrant, hybrid, heteroglossic and the autobiographical
Rushdies have been thoroughly investigated; his ideological
positions attacked and defended; his life-style freely commented
upon – the actual writing, the words on the page, seems very
often to have escaped close analysis. It is as if once something
has been written (and published), it is ‘written’ like a sacred or
at least integral text, to be revered or refused but not analysed
for its local detail and weighed in the critical balance. Felicities
and flaws are alike irrelevant; they are not so much above or
beneath critical notice but simply out of focus. The reason for
this is that a displacement occurred early on; a displacement
which means that the major critical debate over Rushdie almost
always has to do with his ideological positioning. This debate
was started by Timothy Brennan with his book Salman Rushdie
and the Third World in 1989 and joined by Aijaz Ahmad in 1992
with his influential (but tendentious) In Theory. Most critics since
that time have felt obliged to agree or take issue with Brennan
and/or Ahmad, as a trawl through any book index will
demonstrate. This debate then acts as a cage within which the
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CONCLUSION
novels themselves are confined, unable to engage with the real
world on their own terms – as verbal fictions. They are estimated
for how they play or do not play the ideological game
(whichever is being proposed or vilified at the time). Whereas
the ‘great game’ for the novelist as for the poet, is language,
language unfettered by theoretical orientations, and only by the
complex rules of this game will he succeed or fail; will his work
take its place, or not, on the plane of the imagination; where
different discourses blend and clash.
The study of Rushdie by Andrew Teverson published in 2007
is not untypical in this respect and will serve as an illustration
here. Teverson’s book is extremely thorough and informative on
Rushdie’s various contexts, biographical, intellectual, linguistic –
though we note that it is only the politics of language which he
chooses to discuss, rather than its rhetorical features. But then
his critical account of the novels remains curiously noncommittal, discovering other loops and circles to play around
them rather than engaging with the verbal objects that they are.
(Thus we have an eight-page long comparison with Walter Scott
to help determine what kind of historical fiction is Midnight’s
Children). He refers dismissively to one reviewer’s ‘gripes’ about
Rushdie’s later style, but makes no attempt to explain or answer
these gripes; which are actually quite justifiable, and raise
serious questions about Rushdie’s ongoing fictional enterprise.
When Teverson describes Shalimar the Clown as ‘a powerful
novel’, it is the lack of any evidence to support this judgement
that surprises us. He quotes two long paragraphs that ask a
series of questions about atrocities in Kashmir, offering no
suggestion as to how they interface with the fiction; ‘[s]uch
question asking,’ he comments, ‘is characteristic of Rushdie’s
fictional response to political events’ which he then goes on to
consider in directly political terms, for its ‘constructive political
functions’. 4 Likewise, one could question the critical function of
the volume of essays previously cited, the proceedings of a
conference at the University of Pisa devoted entirely to one of
Rushdie’s novels. The title of the volume is itself arresting: The
Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath
Her Feet.5 This is of course a quotation from one of Rai’s more
provocative statements in the novel, where he claims to be doing
just that; I have discussed the passage above, in chapter 9 (pages
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139, 146). But nowhere in the dozen essays that compose this
volume is this central aesthetic issue directly addressed. The
collection represents a formidable (indeed intimidating) display
of scholarship, devoted to the literary allusions, the musical
references, register, idiolect, etc, but all seemingly based on the
premise that Rushdie’s claims for his novel are self-evidently
justified: which is far from being the case. This is the true task of
criticism to decide; and whatever their other merits, books of
this kind do not help us in the act of discrimination.
The kind of hands-on criticism I am thinking of is that singled
out in the first chapter of this study (see above, pages 24–6); that
practised by a critic like James Wood, in his excellent and
exemplary How Fiction Works (2009).6 Fiction works by turning
words; and unless you pay attention to how the words are
turned, you are simply looking at maps of the country you wish
to visit, not walking over the terrain. Or to change the metaphor,
as Wood does in his epigraph, taken from Henry James: ‘There is
only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery.’ Rushdie
cared a great deal for the cookery in Midnight’s Children, and his
‘chutneyfication of history’ produced a work that earned and has
deservedly kept the admiration and affection of its readers. This
process was as much a matter of language – the choice of words,
the structure of sentences; rhythm, balance; image and metaphor
– as it was of vision and overall design; or of ‘constructive political
function’. As much, that is to say, of text as context. Critics address
themselves, no doubt, mainly to readers; but even by this indirect
method, they can perhaps remind an author that it is by the best
of his own work, the work that lives on and does its work in the
imagination, that he will fairly and finally be judged.
184
Notes
CHAPTER 1.
INTRODUCTION
1. Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 282–
3.
2. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. VIII; ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D.
Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 157; Samuel Johnson,
Rambler, no. 125 (28 May 1751); S. T. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’,
Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter (London: Nonesuch Press,
1962), 107.
3. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol. II, ch. ii; ed. Ian Campbell Ross
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 170. Emile Zola’s relegation
of the role of the imagination for the novelist is argued in his essay ‘Le
sens du réel’, from Le Roman expérimental (Paris, 1880). A brief account
will be found in my Realism (London: Methuen, 1970), 29–31.
4. See the account of Wilson Harris’s work in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice
in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 34–6, 149–54;
and extracts in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.),
The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 188, 200–1.
5. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (London: Faber, 1954), 177.
6. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Hyman, 1964), 36–7.
7. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto,
1966), i. 320.
8. Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (London:
Macmillan, 1996), 31.
9. Ashcroft et al. (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 209.
10. The phrase was coined (or adopted) in an editorial from The Crane Bag
reprinted in Mark Hederman and Richard Kearney (eds.), The Crane
Bag Book of Irish Studies (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982). See David
Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), 149.
11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Rushdie makes generous
185
NOTES
acknowledgement in his essays to the importance of Anderson’s book
to his own thinking; it contains, he says, ‘important stuff for the
novelist’ (IH 382).
12. Shelley’s Prose, 279.
13. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File (London:
ICA/ Fourth Estate, 1989), 181, 142.
14. For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech
(New York: George Braziller, 1994), 261.
15. Ziauddin Sardar and Meryl Wyn Davies, Distorted Imagination: Lessons
from the Rushdie Affair (London: Grey Seal, 1990). Sardar writes:
‘[Rushdie’s] perspective as it unfolds through the entire course of his
writing is best described as an angle of attack formed by the
Orientalist view of Islam’ (p. 127).
16. Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship, and
‘The Satanic Verses’ (Southwold: Orwell, 1990), 148.
17. D. J. Enright, ‘The Old Man Comes to his Senses’, Selected Poems
(London: Chatto, 1968), 33.
18. Connor, The English Novel in History, 33. See also the assessment by
Andrzej Gasiorek in Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London:
Arnold, 1995), 167.
19. D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Novel’, in Bruce Steele (ed.), Study of Thomas
Hardy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 155.
20. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. 14; ed. George Watson (London
Dent, 1965), 174.
21. See the articles on Midnight’s Children by Keith Wilson, Nancy E. Batty,
and Patricia Merivale in M. D. Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie:
Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1994), and also the further references in the section on the novel in the
Annotated Bibliography (pp. 362–71). See also Walter Göbel and
Damian Grant, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Silver Medal’, in David Pierce and
Peter de Voogd (eds.), Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 87–98.
22. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol. I, ch. xxii, ed. Ross, p. 58.
23. Una Chaudhuri, ‘Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation
with Salman Rushdie’, Turnstile, 2/1 (1990), 36–47. The text of this
interview may be accessed at website http://www.crl.com/~subir/
rushdie/uc_maps.html.
24. ‘Salman Rushdie talks to Alastair Niven’, Wasafiri, 26 (1997), 55.
25. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation
(London: Macmillan, 1989), 30–1. Brennan’s book also takes up
Benedict Anderson’s idea of the novel as being, along with the
newspaper, a crucial ingredient in the formation of the ‘imagined
community’.
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NOTES
26. Ibid. 34, 69.
27. Ibid. 134.
28. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (London: Faber, 1995), 26.
29. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 135, 49.
30. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso,
1992), 128.
31. Ibid. 131, 134.
32. Ibid. 149–50, 135.
33. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, in Intentions and The Soul of Man
(London: Methuen, 1969), 269.
34. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 43.
35. Ahmad, In Theory, 154–5, 134, 141.
36. Tim Parnell, ‘Salman Rushdie: From Colonial Politics to Postmodern
Politics’, in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Writing India 1757–1900: The
Literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1996), 254–7.
37. James Harrison, Salman Rushdie (New York: Twayne, 1992), 128.
38. Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 66.
39. Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam
(London: Chatto, 1991), 13. (First published as A Satanic Affair: Salman
Rushdie and the Rage of Islam (1990).)
40. Ibid. 15–18.
41. Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1997), 127.
42. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, 26.
43. See the Appendix on ‘The Rushdie Affair’, pp. 88–93.
44. For Rushdie, 6, 10.
45. Sadik Al-Azm, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman
Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 258–77.
46. Srinivias Aravamudan, ‘Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar’, in
Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 197–8.
47. Stephanie Newell, ‘The Other God: Salman Rushdie’s ‘‘New’’
Aesthetic’, Literature and History, 3rd ser., 1/2 (1992), 67–87.
48. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997), 22, 37, 52–3.
49. Ibid. 55. For Cundy’s consideration of this aspect in the later novels,
see ibid. 78–9, 116.
50. Inderpal Grewal, ‘Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame’,
in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 123–4, 143.
51. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, ‘The Politics of Post-Colonial
Identity in Salman Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 149,
153, 157.
52. M. D. Fletcher, ‘Introduction’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 1–20.
Likewise, Fletcher’s own essay, ‘Rushdie’s Shame as Apologue’ (pp. 97–
187
NOTES
108), proposes this unfamiliar formal category (supplemented with
ridicule, satire, farce, and fairy tale), which is unlikely to inspire the
reader.
53. Ib Johansen, ‘The Flight from the Enchanter: Reflections on Salman
Rushdie’s Grimus’, in ibid. 25; Catherine Cundy, ‘ ‘‘Rehearsing
Voices’’: Salman Rushdie’s Grimus’, in ibid. 48.
54. Peter Brigg, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Novels: The Disorder in Fantastic
Order’, in ibid. 181.
55. These descriptions are taken from the section on The Satanic Verses in
the Annotated Bibliography in ibid. 381–95.
56. Uma Parameswaran, ‘New Dimensions Courtesy of the Whirling
Demons: Word-Play in Grimus’, in ibid. 42; Keith Wilson, ‘Midnight’s
Children and Reader Responsibility’, in ibid. 62; Patricia Merivale,
‘Saleem Fathered by Oscar: Intertextual Strategies in Midnight’s
Children and The Tin Drum’, in ibid. 84, 94.
57. See Aravamudan, ‘Being God’s Postman’; Kundera, Testaments
Betrayed; and Feroza Jussawalla, ‘Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The
Satanic Verses as Rushdie’s Love Letter to Islam’, Diacritics, 26 (1996),
50–73.
58. See Nancy E. Batty, ‘The Art of Suspense: Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-)Nights,’ in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 69–82; Connor, The English
Novel in History, 30–3, 112–27; Michael M. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi,
‘Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses’, Cultural Anthropology, 5/2 (1990), 107–59; N. Rombes Jr., ‘The
Satanic Verses as Cinematic Narrative’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 11/1
(1993), 47–53.
59. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under
Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. xvii–xviii.
60. ‘Salman Rushdie Talks to Alastair Niven’, Wasafiri, 26 (1997), 53.
61. A selection from the essays in Imaginary Homelands: Rushdie praises
Rudyard Kipling’s ‘invented Indiaspeak’, and the ‘demotic voice of
black Afrikaner South Africa’ in Rian Malan (IH 77, 198); he notes
Gunther Grass’s contribution to the reconstruction of the German
language after the war, and the way Gabriel Marquez’s grandmother
functioned as a ‘linguistic lodestone’ for him (IH 279, 300); he
appreciates E. L. Doctorow’s ‘great rush of language’, and Thomas
Pynchon’s ‘brilliant way with names’ (IH 300, 355). At the same time,
he deplores the ‘rotten writing’ of Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography,
and regrets the ‘dead language’ of Handsworth Songs (IH 57, 115). Even
Kurt Vonnegut fails in this respect, with Hocus Pocus; in this novel,
‘that old hocus-pocus, language, just isn’t working’ (IH 360).
62. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (eds.), The Vintage Book of Indian
Writing 1947–1997 (London: Vintage, 1997), p. xviii.
63. Rustom Bharucha, ‘Rushdie’s Whale’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
188
NOTES
Rushdie, 162, 165, 169–70.
64 Jacqueline Bardolph, ‘Language is Courage’, in ibid. 212.
65. Harrison, Salman Rushdie, 127. See also the appreciation of Rushdie’s
language in the Introduction by Anita Desai to the Everyman edition
of Midnight’s Children (1995), pp. ix–x, xviii-xix.
CHAPTER 2.
GRIMUS
1. Rushdie himself recalls, ‘I had one novel rejected, [and] abandoned
two others’ before Grimus (IH 1). According to Ian Hamilton, there
was an early novel about Rugby called ‘Terminal Report’, and also
(after Grimus) another Indian novel with more political edge, called
‘Madame Rama’, which was ‘plundered’ for Midnight’s Children (‘The
First Life of Salman Rushdie’, New Yorker, 71/42 (25 Dec. 1995), 96, 100,
102).
2. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. II, ch. 1; ed. R. P. Mutter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 88.
3. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), 253. One of the characters in The Moor’s Last Sigh
elaborates a social philosophy based upon Joyce’s phrase, which he
has supposedly picked up from the serial publication of the novel in
The Egoist; and which he attempts to promulgate in a paper called
Towards a Provisional Theory of the Transformational Fields of Conscience
(MLS 20).
4. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the
Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989), 70.
5. Liz Calder’s original assessment is worth recalling here: ‘although it
was barmy in some ways, all over the place, I thought it was amazing,’
she says, particularly for its ‘extraordinary use of language’ (Hamilton,
‘The First Life of Salman Rushdie’, 101).
6. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File (London:
ICA/Fourth Estate, 1989), 30.
7. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 72, 74; Catherine Cundy,
Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 16.
CHAPTER 3.
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
1. See John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985),
237–8.
2. See Charu Verma, ‘Padma’s Tragedy: A Feminist Deconstruction of
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, in Sushila Singh (ed.), Feminism and
Recent Fiction in English (New Delhi: Prestige, 1991), 154–62.
189
NOTES
3. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol. II, ch. xi; ed. Ian Campbell Ross
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.
4. Published in the original Spanish as Rayuela in 1963; translated as
Hopscotch in 1966.
5. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the
Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989), 85.
6. Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London:
Arnold, 1995), 167.
7. Keith Wilson, ‘Midnight’s Children and Reader Responsibility’, in
M. D. Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman
Rushdie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 55–68.
8. The Tempest, I. ii. 49.
9. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 123.
10. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Derek Roper (London:
Collins, 1968), 33.
11. See e.g. Philip Engblom, ‘A Multitude of Voices: Carnivalization and
Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.),
Reading Rushdie, 293–304.
12. Published in 1904 and 1902 respectively. Both stories appear in
Kipling’s Mrs Bathurst and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991).
13. See the interview with Steve Crawshaw in the Independent on Sunday, 8
Feb. 1998, pp. 29–31.
14. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 38, 69, 140, 159.
15. Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (London:
Macmillan, 1996), 31–2.
16. See e.g. Patricia Merivale, ‘Saleem Fathered by Oscar: Intertextual
Strategies in Midnight’s Children and The Tin Drum’, in Fletcher (ed.),
Reading Rushdie, 83–96.
17. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972), 45.
18. See the article by Clement Hawes, ‘Leading History by the Nose: The
Turn to the Eighteenth Century in Midnight’s Children’, Modern Fiction
Studies, 39/1 (1993), 147–68. Hawes argues that the ‘logic of the babyswap is precisely against the grain of conventional ‘‘birth mysteries’’ ’,
which, elsewhere, were used to authorize essentialist and ultimately
racist attitudes.
19. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 239.
20. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O’Prey (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1983), 66; J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Berkley,
1962). There may also be a recollection here of Angela Carter’s story
‘Master’, from her 1974 collection Fireworks.
190
NOTES
CHAPTER 4.
SHAME
1. See Ian Hamilton, ‘The First Life of Salman Rushdie’, New Yorker, 71/42
(25 Dec. 1995), 105 (‘This Booker night of ‘‘Shame’’ has now passed
into legend, by means of a Rushdiesque process of telling and
retelling’).
2. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the
Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989), 123; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory:
Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 139; Catherine
Cundy, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1997), 44.
3. Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam
(London: Chatto, 1991), 14; James Harrison, Salman Rushdie (New
York: Twayne, 1992), 24; Keith Booker, ‘Beauty and the Beast: Dualism
as Despotism in the fiction of Salman Rushdie’, in M. D. Fletcher (ed.),
Reading Rushdie: Perspectives in the fiction of Salman Rushdie (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1994), 249.
4. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), 240–
3.
5. Ibid. 237.
6. See e.g. Ashutosh Banerjee, ‘A Critical Study of Shame’, and Suresh
Chandra, ‘The Metaphor of Shame: Rushdie’s Fact-Fiction’. Both these
articles, originally published in the Commonwealth Review, are
reprinted in G. R. Taneja and R.K. Dhawan (eds.), The Novels of
Salman Rushdie (New Delhi: Prestige, 1992).
7. Homi Bhabha, ‘Unpacking my Library . . . Again’, in Iain Chambers
and Linda Curti (eds.), The Post-Colonial Question (London: Routledge,
1996), 208.
8. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ch. 15; ed. Kathryn Sutherland
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 122.
9. Timothy Brennan, ‘Shame’s Holy Book’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 112.
10. Rushdie comments: ‘The book is partly about the way in which
women are socially repressed . . . .Omar Khayyam’s mothers are
another instance of female solidarity, which is really brought about
by the way in which they are obliged to live in the male-dominated
society’ (Haffenden, Novelists in Interview), 256.
11. Salman Rushdie, ‘Midnight’s Children and Shame’, Kunapipi 7/1 (1985),
13.
12. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, vol. IV, ch. viii; ed. Paul Turner
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 270. For the reference to A
Tale of a Tub, see Ch. 7, n. 11 below.
13. Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1934), 231.
191
NOTES
14. Timothy Brennan, ‘Shame’s Holy Book’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 119.
15. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 254–5.
CHAPTER 5.
THE SATANIC VERSES
1. See especially Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the
Wrath of Islam (London: Chatto, 1991), ch. 1, and Milan Kundera, ‘The
Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh’, in Testaments Betrayed
(London: Faber, 1995), 1–33. Also the contributions by D. J. Enright,
Homi Bhabha, Naguib Mahfouz, Carlos Fuentes, Michael Ignatieff,
and others to Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie
File (London: ICA/Fourth Estate, 1989); and the general tenor of
contributions to For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in
Defense of Free Speech (New York: George Braziller, 1994).
2. Appignanesi and Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File, 6–7.
3. See Pierre François, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Philosophical Materialism in
The Satanic Verses’, in M. D. Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie: Perspectives
on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 305–20, at
305. Milan Kundera also has interesting observations on how the
structure of the novel serves its meaning, in Testaments Betrayed, 21–3.
4. Hamlet, II. ii. 594–5.
5. Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (London:
Macmillan, 1996), 124.
6. For a further consideration of this question, see Walter Göbel and
Damian Grant, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Silver Medal’, in David Pierce and
Peter de Voogd (eds.), Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 87–98.
7. See Ruthven, A Satanic Affair, 24–5.
8. Walter Benjamin proposes that ‘memory is the epic faculty par
excellence’ (Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973), 96).
9. Connor, The English Novel in History, 113.
10. Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar’, in
Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 187–208.
11. Ibid. 199–203. Aravamudan notes: ‘The precise linguistic, indeed
palindromic, opposite of muhammad ‘‘the glorified’’ or ‘‘the praised’’
in Arabic, is mudhammam, meaning ‘‘reprobate’’ or ‘‘apostate’’ ’ (p.
202).
12. Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Faber, 1980), 30.
13. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel
(Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1993), 168–9. See also
Feroza Jussawalla, ‘Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses as
Rushdie’s Love-Letter to Islam’, Diacritics, 26 (1996), 50–73.
192
NOTES
14. In an author’s note to a leaflet published by The Book Trust in
conjunction with the British Council in 1987, Rushdie remarks: ‘First
the writer invents the books; then, perhaps, the books invent the
writer.’
15. Steve McDonogh (ed.), The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to
Write (Dingle, Co. Derry: Brandon, 1993), 125–83. All facts and
quotations in the next three paragraphs are taken from this source.
16. Rushdie’s own account of this episode may be found in the essay ‘One
Thousand Days in a Balloon’ (IH 434–7).
17. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1960), 203.
18. Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech (London: Faber, 1990), 88.
19. The Rushdie Letters, 141.
20. Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship, and
‘The Satanic Verses’ (Southwold: Orwell, 1990).
21. Lee, The Cost of Free Speech, 103.
22. See, for a detailed study of this aspect, Joel Kuortti, Place of the Sacred:
The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997).
23. Ruthven, A Satanic Affair, 48.
24. Ibid. 47.
25. Lee, The Cost of Free Speech, 47.
26. In an interview published in 1996, Rushdie welcomed the fact that The
Satanic Verses ‘is gradually getting off the news pages and getting back
into the world of books’ (Colin McCabe et al., ‘Salman Rushdie Talks to
the London Consortium about The Satanic Verses’, Critical Quarterly, 38/
2 (1996), 66). This process should now be accelerated; and not only in
books. The Satanic Verses clearly provided part of the inspiration for
David Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ, both through the ‘reality
loops’ that enrich and destabilize Rushdie’s plot and through the
predicament of the author in the aftermath of publication. The film
concerns an artist, a creator of games, who becomes embroiled in and
victim of his/her own creation (it being part of the game that we are
never sure who is the ultimate game-master: is God a man or a
woman?). The game contends for reality. At various points in the film,
where the narrative is cornered and rational argument breaks down,
there is only a slogan (‘Death to the Demoness Allegra Geller . . . ‘Death to Realism’ . . . ‘Death to Yevgeni Nourish . . . for Deformation of
Reality’), followed by an act of violence which projects us to another
level. But the levels never resolve or stabilize, and we are left at the
end of the film – after another dramatic reversal – with a rhetorical
question: ’Are we still in the game?’ Intriguingly, it seems that Rushdie
has returned Cronenberg’s compliment, drawing on the director’s
ingenious treatment of games in this film for the rebellious gameworld in his later novel Fury; see chapter 10, below.
193
NOTES
CHAPTER 6.
HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES AND EAST,
WEST
1. James Fenton,‘ Keeping Up with Salman Rushdie’, New York Review of
Books, 28 Mar. 1991, p. 31.
2. Several of the critical articles on Haroun draw parallels with Rushdie’s
personal situation. See the relevant entries in the Annotated
Bibliography in M. D. Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on
the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 395–6.
3. In Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
4. One critic suggests that Rushdie’s smuggling in of this female narrator
is a gesture of solidarity with the woman novelist: see Marlene S. Barr
‘Haroun and Seeing Women’s Stories: Salman Rushdie and Marianne
Wiggins’, in Barr (ed.), Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and
Beyond (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
5. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. VIII; ed. A. C. Guthkelch and
D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 158.
6. There is probably a reference in both these instances to Lewis Carroll’s
use of the chessboard to represent regulation in the Alice stories.
7. Rushdie has remarked that it was when he realized there was a story
to be made of the stories, which taken together represent ‘a step by
step journey’, that he decided to ‘put them together in a book’:
‘Salman Rushdie Talks to Alastair Niven’, Wasafiri, 26 (1997), 54.
Catherine Cundy has actually suggested that the interlocking of the
stories is intended to produce a parallel to the Mahabharata; but,
although she cites what she sees as specific allusions (as where the
unwinding of the ayah’s sari by the escalator in ‘The Courter’ parallels
the disrobing of Drapaudi), the idea of a systematic counterpoint
seems implausible (Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 3–4).
8. It is possible that Rushdie took the idea of a congregation of fictional
characters from Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Textermination (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991). In this intriguing work, hundreds of
characters from fiction, film, and television attend a conference in
San Francisco to ‘compete for being’ in the world of their readers and
viewers. If so, it is only a compliment returned, since among the
characters convoked by Brooke-Rose is Gibreel Farishta himself, from
The Satanic Verses.
9. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana,
1973), 93.
10. ‘Salman Rushdie talks to Alastair Niven’, 54.
194
NOTES
CHAPTER 7.
THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH
1. See e.g. the reviews by Peter Kemp (Sunday Times, 3 Sept. 1995),
Michael Wood (London Review of Books, 7 Sept. 1995), Orhan Pamuk
(TLS, 8 Sept. 1995), James Wood (Guardian, 8 Sept, 1995), J. M. Coetzee
(New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 1996).
2. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997), 116, 110.
3. J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 1996, p. 14.
4. There may well be an allusion here to Adrian Mitchell’s lines on
Charlie Parker: ‘He breathed in air, he breathed out light / Charlie
Parker was my delight’ (‘Goodbye’, For Beauty Douglas (Alison &
Busby, 1982). Especially when the next phrase reads: ‘– We breathe light
– the trees pipe up.’
5. Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1934), 313.
6. Samuel Beckett, Molloy: Malone Dies: The Unnamable (London: John
Calder, 1959), 7.
7. ‘Midnight’s Children had history as a scaffolding on which to hang the
book; this one [The Satanic Verses] doesn’t’ (Rushdie in interview with
Sean French, in Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds.), The
Rushdie File (London: ICA/Fourth Estate, 1989), 8).
8. The personal feeling may be authorized by the fact that the novel with
its palimpsest metaphor relates to a Rushdie family anecdote
concerning an actual portrait of his mother, lost in all probability
through being overpainted (see 13 below).
9. Orhan Pamuk remarks on the danger (just avoided here) of lapsing
into an ‘old-style Indian melodrama’, and suggests that the ‘overabundance of fame, money, sex, and glamour gives the book an aura of
a grotesque jet-set novel set in Bombay’ (TLS, 8 Sept. 1995, p. 3).
10. Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 283.
11. ‘Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how
much it altered her Person for the worse’ (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a
Tub, sect. IX; ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1958), 173; Beckett, Molloy: Malone Dies: The
Unnamable, 268–9.
12. John Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 Dec. 1817, in Letters
of John Keats, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford University Press,
1954), 53.
13. This anecdote from Rushdie’s family was explored in the programme,
‘The Lost Portrait’ (transmitted by BBC 2 on 11 Sept. 1995), describing
Rushdie’s visit to India in search of a portrait of his mother. Rushdie
found the artist, but the canvas had been reused and the painting was
therefore untraceable.
195
NOTES
14. J. M. Coetzee is, however, not impressed by this gesture, which he
describes as part of a ‘postmodern textual romp’. As he sees it, there is
a ready solution to the Moor’s problem: ‘If as self-narrator he wants to
escape the inessential determinants of his life, he need only storytell
his way out of them’ (New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 1996, p. 15).
15. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana,
1973), 94.
CHAPTER 8.
INTERCHAPTER
1. See the essay ‘A Dream of Glorious Return’ (SAL 195–227).
2. See the article ‘Manhattan Transfer’ by D. T. Max, reprinted from the
New York Times in The Observer, 24 Sept. 2000.
3. It was Matt Thorne in The Independent who proposed Rushdie’s
‘relegation’; (‘Rich Man’s Blues’ 26 Aug. 2001); John Sutherland’s
defence (‘Suddenly, Rushdie’s a Second Division Dud’) appeared in
The Guardian, 3 Sept. 2001.
4. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2007), 169–83; 173–4.
5. The film was Bridget Jones’s Diary, directed by Sharon Maguire, (2001).
For the idea of performance, see note 13 to chapter 10 below.
6. ‘Sir Salman’s long journey’, The Guardian, 18 June 2007.
7. See the interview in The Observer (12 June 2011).
CHAPTER 9.
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
1. Interview with Sara Rance, in Chauhan (2001), 259. Several critics
have reacted favourably to Rushdie’s attempt to write a ‘pop’ novel:
see Teverson (2007) ch. 10, ‘The pop novel in the age of globalisation’.
2. The essay so titled appears in James Wood (2004), 167–83. Wood
identifies Rushdie among others as writers (descended from Dickens,
‘an easy model’) who have developed hyperbolic excrescences of style
to keep pace with the modern world; also, a ‘cinematic vulgarity’
deriving from the prestige of the seventh art. The phrase is used again
in Wood’s highly critical essay on Fury, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Nobu
Novel’ which appears in the same collection (210–22).
3. Rushdie once said (under whatever levels of irony), ‘If you offer me a
movie to direct I’ll never write a book again’ (Chauhan 2001, 104). The
irony is peeled off somewhat by his recent statement (see Interchapter) about the superiority of TV drama to both fiction and film.
4. A point made by Carmen Concilio in her article ‘‘‘Worthy of the
World’’: The Narrator/Photographer in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground
196
NOTES
Beneath Her Feet’, in The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s ‘The
Ground Beneath Her Feet’, eds. Else Linguanti and Viktoria
Tchernikova (Pisa: Edizioni Ets, 2003) 117–27; 118.
5. Interview with Charlie Rose, in Chauhan (2001), 257.
6. This formulation owes more to Shakespeare’s Berowne, in his
celebrated valuation of women in Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘From women’s
eyes this doctrine I derive;/They are the books, the arts, the academes,/
That show, contain, and nourish all the world’ (IV. iii. 290–2).
7. Several critics have commented (approvingly and otherwise) on the
device of the ‘parallel world’ that Rushdie sets up in this novel.
Rushdie himself commented, in interview, on the ‘outrageous
fictional proposition’ he was making with Ormus and Vina: ‘I said,
‘‘OK, well, what I’m obviously doing is making a slightly variant form
of the real world.’’ And then I . . . just had fun with that idea.’
(Interview with Charlie Rose; Chauhan 2001, 260)
8. In the chapter ‘Salman Rushdie’s American Idyll,’ from his book Race,
Immigration and American Identity (2008), 23–49, Randy Boyagoda
accuses Rushdie of playing fast and loose with American history and
culture in order to construct ‘something of a virtual America’ (34),
which is effectively the immigrants’ version of the American Dream:
get American ground beneath your feet, make your pile on it, and
nobody will ask questions. Vina is his main target. ‘Vina is always
Rai’s main index of American life’ (38). Vina is ‘redefined as a global
Gatsby: she goes from being from nowhere and possessing nothing,
to . . . being from everywhere and having everything’ (39). Her
experience of the American south is ‘altogether unhinged from real
history’ (43). Boyagoda then identifies ‘the inadequacy of Rushdie’s
extraterritorial prose’ (a phrase he quotes from Nico Israel) ‘to engage
even a modicum of the deep history of this particular American
region’ (41). He goes on to demonstrate that Rai with his happy
ending is ‘the beneficiary of these fruits . . . blind (like any good
American) to his complicity in the nation’s predations’, the interest
here being ‘his proximate relationship to Rushdie himself’ (47–8).
Boyagoda concludes with the observation that ‘[w]hile Brennan,
writing in 1989, balanced critique and esteem in his evaluation of
Rushdie, the author’s more recent fiction demands a more exacting
judgement’, a judgement unimpressed by ‘the immigrant-led
merriments of money-making, mobility, and newness’ (48–9).
9. The idea of such communication may well have been suggested by the
assertion of William Blake relative to his own dead brother, that ‘I hear
his advice & even now write from his Dictate’ (letter to W. Haley, 6
May 1800; Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes; OUP (1966).
797).
10. We remember that the image of the cinema screen as mediator of
197
NOTES
reality/realities is used to good effect in both Midnight’s Children and
The Satanic Verses. Not surprisingly, therefore, we have a sense here of
déjà vu.
11. Timothy Brennan has referred to this feature in Rushdie’s recent
work as ‘current events collage’, and the phrase is apposite enough
(quoted by Stephen Morton, Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008), 149).
12. ‘On remarquera . . . que l ’Amérique n’est pas tendre pour les
romanciers auxquels elle n’a pas donné le jour,’ ‘Salman Rushdie
entre rock’n’roll et mythologie,’ Le Monde interactif, Feb. 2001.
13. This phrase is used in the title of the volume of essays cited in note 4
above (Pisa, 2003). The fact that Rai/Rushdie’s claim is not interrogated
in the volume is typical of the uncritical stance taken by some dutiful
scholarship towards Rushdie’s work. (I return to this argument in my
conclusion.)
14. SAL, 118–21. The article begins; ‘It has all been so disturbingly
novelistic’, referring of course to J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, which had
recently been filmed by David Cronenberg. Justyna Deszcz has a
chapter on Rushdie’s use of Diana in her book Rushdie in Wonderland
(2004), where she is surprisingly uncritical of the strategy. It is also
curious that Anshuman Mondal, writing on the novel in The Cambridge
Companion to Salman Rushdie (ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Cambridge,
2007; 169–83), while being very exercised by the ‘hyperbole that
surrounds Vina’s death’ and the ‘rather bizarre manner in which
celebrity has come to acquire an importance much greater than is
warranted’ (176), makes no mention of the Diana parallel.
15. Macbeth, V. v. 25–7.
16. Howards End (1910, ch. 5; Vintage (New York, 1989), 34 ).
17. The Magic Mountain (1924), VII: ‘Fullness of Harmony’.
18. Much Ado About Nothing, II. iii. 58–9.
19. Further assertions as to ‘the superiority of the art of photography’,
dubiously reinforced (’According to Roland Barthes, narration is
always false and deceitful, while photography is always referential
and truthful’ (126)) expose rather than evidence her argument. And
the essay concludes with the weak observation that Rai faces up in the
end to ‘the complexity of life’.
CHAPTER 10.
THREE NOVELS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM
1. ‘Pakistan’s Deadly Game’, The Daily Beast, 2 May 2011. Ruvani
Ranasinha’s essay ‘The fatwa and its aftermath’ (in Gurnah, 2007;
45–59) provides a useful perspective on the development of Rushdie’s
ideas since 1989.
198
NOTES
2. Literature Matters [emagazine published by the British Council], 32;
2001.
3. On the reception of Fury, see note 3 to the Interchapter, above. James
Wood criticizes the novel from another aspect; what he sees as its
relentless commodification and superficiality (’Salman Rushdie’s
Nobu Novel’, in The Irresponsible Self; On Laughter and the Novel
(London: Pimlico, 2005; 210–22).
4. References to the cinema are as usual important in the novel; to
Kieslowski and Spielberg among others. Of particular importance is
Tarkovsky’s SF film Solaris (1972), which provides Solanka with a
model for his own thinking (and indeed Rushdie with a version of his
plot); see the paragraph on page 220, concluding ‘ . . . we are left with
the image of the mighty, seductive ocean of memory, imagination and
dream, where nothing dies, where what you need is always waiting
for you on a porch, or running towards you across a vivid lawn with
childish cries and happy, open arms’.
5. ‘Authorship as Crisis: Salman Rushdie’s Fury’, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 40:1 (2005), 137–56. Brouillette’s article offers an intriguing
study of the politics of authorship, and of the way larger contexts –
including the media – dispossess an author of his text; or at least of its
meaning. Thus understood, Fury represents an important commentary on the global sequel to The Satanic Verses.
6. As is suggested by Justyna Deszcz in her article ‘Solaris, America,
Disneyworld and Cyberspace: Salman Rushdie’s Fairy-Tale Utopianism in Fury’, Reconstruction: A Culture Studies eJournal 2:3 (Summer
2002), 47 paragraphs; http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/deszcz.
htm
7.
A doll in the doll-maker’s house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
’That is an insult to us.’
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Outscreams the whole shelf: ‘Although
There’s not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.’ . . .
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Methuen, 1961), 141–2.
8. Rasselas (1759; Oxford: OUP, 1988), 78.
9. Ursula le Guin, reviewing The Enchantress of Florence in The Guardian,
29 March 2008.
10. ‘I have always been described as a storytelling writer, but actually the
199
NOTES
thing that’s hardest is the plot. I’m fine at bits and pieces, but a plot
that actually works often comes last.’ (Interview with Sara Rance,
(Chauhan 2001, 107)).
11. We are more likely to confuse him with the Wandering Jew,
Ahuserius.
12. In addition, we may note the references to the emperor Akbar in the
essay in SAL where Rushdie also confesses his enthusiasm for Akbar’s
ancestor, the Mughal ruler Babur, and his famous book, the Baburana
(SAL 188–94). Significantly, Rushdie compares Babur here to
Machiavelli (193).
13. This aspect of ‘performing’ oneself – which we meet often in
Rushdie’s characters – is illuminated by a comment made by the
author in an interview with Sara Rance. ‘Performance – the idea of
acting in society, especially to people who have had to change
themselves dramatically from their original selves in order to live in
the world – is very important in the book [The Satanic Verses], the way it
is in Indian art.’ (Chauhan 2001, 106).
14. ‘Love and Friendship’ [sic], in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane
Austen, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 107.
15. See Note 6 to Chapter 5 (The Satanic Verses) above.
16. Interview with Terry Gross, 21 April 1999 (Chauhan 2001, 276).
CHAPTER 11.
CONCLUSION
1. Randy Boyogoda takes Rushdie to task for the trivializing effect of
this allusion (Boyagoda 2008, 35).
2. Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin (1983), 107).
Conrad’s Kurtz is a model of destructive obsession, crazed egotism;
and though his presence is much more palpable in the dense
undergrowth of Conrad’s language, one finds oneself thinking of him
as a progenitor of Rushdie’s rock stars. Marlow’s description of Kurtz
continues here suggestively: ‘He was alone, and I before him did not
know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.’
3. Rai/Rushdie could well listen to the reprimand made by Soraya to her
son Luka in LFL, when he starts to play around with ‘parallel realities’:
‘In the real world there are no levels, only difficulties . . . Life is
tougher than video games’ (11–13). Perhaps it is time for the selfeffacing Mrs Khalifa to try her hand at fiction?
4. Teverson (2007), 128–35, 224–5. See in this respect the whole chapter
(’Afterword’) on Shalimar, 217–26.
5. See Note 4 to Chapter 9 above.
6. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008; Vintage, 2009. Wood explains in his
Introduction: ‘I have tried to give the most detailed accounts of the
200
NOTES
technique of that artifice – of how fiction works – in order to reconnect
that technique to the world, as Ruskin wanted to connect Tintoretto’s
work to how we look at a leaf’ (2–3). It is true that Wood finds against
Rushdie in the chapter on Fury in his earlier work The Irresponsible Self:
On Laughter and the Novel, but I would counter-argue here that Wood’s
address to the language in this novel is unduly (indeed irritably)
selective. Which is also to say that responsible, verbal criticism can
always lead us in different directions. But meanwhile the detail, the
‘facts’ that we are adducing from the text are real facts, even if not – as
the critical use of them never can be – the ‘whole truth.’
201
Select Bibliography
WORKS BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
Novels
Grimus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975; Grafton, 1977).
Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981; Picador, 1983;
Everyman’s Library, 1995, with an introduction by Anita Desai).
Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983; Picador, 1984).
The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988; Delaware: The Consortium,
1992).
The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999).
Fury (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).
Shalimar the Clown (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).
The Enchantress of Florence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008).
Short Stories
East, West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994).
‘The Firebird’s Nest’, The New Yorker (23/30 June 1997, 122–7); reprinted
in Telling Tales, ed. Nadine Gordimer (New York: Picador, 2004), 45–
64.
Children’s Stories
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta Books/Penguin, 1990).
Luka and the Fire of Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010).
Poems
‘6 March 1989’, Granta, 28 (Aug. 1989), 28–9.
‘Crusoe’, Granta 31 (Sept. 1990), 128.
Screenplay
The Screenplay of Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1999).
202
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Film and Television
‘The Painter and the Pest’, (Channel 4, 2 Dec. 1985; text in Imaginary
Homelands, 152–6).
‘The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987 ’ (Channel 4, 27 Mar. 1988:
text in Imaginary Homelands, 26–33).
‘The Lost Portrait’ (BBC 2, 11 Sept. 1995).
Non-Fiction
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (London: Viking, 1987; Picador,
1987).
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta
Books, 1991).
The Wizard of Oz: A Short Text about Magic (BFI Film Classics; London:
BFI, 1992).
Introduction to Rudyard Kipling, Soldiers Three and In Black and White
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. ix–xv.
Introduction to Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories
(London: Vintage, 1996), pp. ix–xiv.
Edited (with Elizabeth West), The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–97
(London: Vintage, 1997); Introduction by Rushdie, pp. ix–xxii.
Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Vintage,
2003).
Edited (with Heidi Pitlor), The Best American Short Stories (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
SELECTED INTERVIEWS
There are two collections of the more important interviews with
Rushdie; the first, edited by Michael Reder, Conversations with Salman
Rushdie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000); and the second,
edited by Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Salman Rushdie Interviews: a Sourcebook of his Ideas (Westport: Greenwood, 2001). Interviews continue to
appear, and many may be accessed online. For example, the Wikipedia
entry on Salman Rushdie provides links to a dozen recent interviews.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kuortti, Joel, The Salman Rushdie Bibliography (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
1997).
See also the bibliographical appendix (353–9) and annotated bibliography (361–96) in M. D. Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie (Amsterdam:
203
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rodopi, 1994).
Among works listed below, those by Abdulrazak Gurnah (ed. 2007) and
Stephen Morton (2008) contain very full, updated bibliographies. In
the former, the bibliography is usefully subdivided into sections.
BIOGRAPHY
Hamilton, Ian, ‘The First Life of Salman Rushdie’, The New Yorker, 71/42
(25 Dec. 1995), 90–113. Repr. in Ian Hamilton, The Trouble with Money
and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). This biographical
essay draws on many personal and published sources, not least from
Rushdie himself. Hamilton acknowledges Rushdie’s ‘generous help’
with the essay, which was given on one condition: ‘provided that I
did not pursue my researches beyond what was for him the final
day of his first life: Valentine’s Day, 1989.’
Weatherby, William J., Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death (New York:
Carroll & Graf, 1990).
The two collections of interviews listed above (ed. Reder 2000, and ed.
Chauhan 2001) contain a good deal of (auto) biographical material.
Among recent studies, that by Andrew Teverson (2007; details
below) contains a substantial chapter on biographical contexts (67–
107). Again, online sources provide further material: not all of it
always reliable.
CRITICAL STUDIES
Books on Rushdie
Blake, Andrew, Salman Rushdie (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001).
Bloom, Harold (ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Salman Rushdie
(Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002).
Booker, Keith (ed.), Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie (New York: G. K.
Hall, 1999).
Brennan, Timothy, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the
Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989). A sustained critique of Rushdie’s
ideological position, working through an analysis of the novels from
Grimus to The Satanic Verses.
Clark, Roger Y., Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds (Montreal:
McGill UP, 2001).
Cundy, Catherine, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997). A novel-by-novel account of Rushdie’s fiction, including a ‘Postscript’ on The Moor’s Last Sigh, with emphasis on contexts
204
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
and intertexts; the feminist perspective finds unfavourably for the
author.
Deszcz, Justyna, Rushdie in Wonderland: Fairytaleness in Rushdie’s fiction
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004).
Fletcher, M. D. (ed.), Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman
Rushdie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). A collection of twenty-two
essays from different sources, focusing on each of the novels in turn.
Contains a very useful annotated bibliography and ‘Some Books
and Articles about the Rushdie Affair’.
Freigang, Lisa, Formations of Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Fictions
(Marburg: Tectum-Verlag, 2009).
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A., Salman Rushdie (London: Macmillan, 1998; 2nd
ed., 2009). A loosely structured commentary on the novels, linking
them to Rushdie’s biography.
Gupta, Meenu, Salman Rushdie: Re-telling History through Fiction (New
Delhi: Prestige, 2009).
Gurnah, Abdulrazak, The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). The bibliography, pp. 187–96,
is extremely thorough and discriminating on individual novels,
themes, etc.
Harrison, James, Salman Rushdie (New York: Twayne, 1992). Considers
each of the novels (to The Satanic Verses) in the context of Rushdie’s
complex background and influence; corrective to some postcolonial
theory.
Hassumani, Sabrina, Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of his Major
Works (Madison: Fairley Dickinson UP, 2002).
Kimmich, Matt, Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie’s Family Novels
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
Kortenaar, Neil, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children (Montreal: McGill UP, 2004).
Linguanti, Elsa and Tchernichova, Viktoria (eds.), The Great Work of
Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Pisa:
Edizioni Ets, 2003).
Mittapalli, R. and Kuortti, J. (eds.), Salman Rushdie: New Critical Insights
(New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2003).
Morton, Stephen, Salman Rushdie: The Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008).
Parameswaran, Uma, The Perforated Sheet: Essays on Salman Rushdie’s Art
(New Delhi: Affiliated, 1988). A collection of seven previously
published articles.
Petersson, Margareta, Unending Metamorphoses: Myth, Satire, and Religion
in Salman Rushdie’s Novels (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press,
1996). A rich study of the influence of alchemical and other
transformative ideas on Rushdie’s work.
205
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rao, M. Madhusan, Salman Rushdie’s Fiction: A Study: The Satanic Verses
Excluded (New Delhi: Sterling, 1992). A study of the relation between
‘timelessness’ and history in Rushdie’s first three novels.
Reynolds, Margaret/Noakes, Jonathan, Salman Rushdie: The Essential
Guide (London: Vintage, 2003).
Sanga, Jaina C., Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration,
Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization (Westport: Greenwood, 2001).
Seminck, Hans, A Novel Visible but Unseen: A Thematic Analysis of Salman
Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ (Gent: Studia Germanica Gandensia,
1993).
Taneja, G. R., and Dhawan, R. K. (eds.), The Novels of Salman Rushdie
(New Delhi: Prestige, 1992). A collection of twenty-four essays
mainly by Indian writers, previously published in the Journal for
Commonwealth Studies. Grouped around the novels, the essays, and
‘Themes and Techniques.’
Teverson, Andrew, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: MUP, 2007). See the
Conclusion for a description of and critical response to this work.
Thiara, Nicole, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the
Nation into Being (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009).
Books with chapters, sections, or essays on Rushdie
Acheson, James (ed.), The British and Irish Novel since 1960 (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1991).
Adam, Ian, and Tiffin, Helen (eds.), Past the Last Post: Theorizing PostColonialism and Postmodernism (New York: Harvester, 1991).
Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre
and Ideology in the Novels of R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala
Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1993).
Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso,
1992).
Aldama, Frederick Luis, Postethnic Narrative Criticism (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2003).
Alexander, Maguerite, Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in
Postmodernist British and American Fiction (London: Arnold, 1990).
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen, The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London:
Routledge, 1989).
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen, (eds.), The PostColonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995).
Ball, John Clement, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua
Achebe, Salman Rushdie (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
206
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Banerjee, Mita, The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael
Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate (Heidelberg:
Universitatsverlag C.Winter, 2002).
Becker, Carol, The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Benson, Eugene, and Conolly, L. W. (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial
Literatures in English (London: Routledge, 1994).
Benson, Stephen (ed.), Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 2008).
Bertens, Hans, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge,
1995).
Bevan, David, Literature and Exile (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990).
Bhabha, Homi (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990).
_____ The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Boyagoda, Randy, Race, Immigration and American Identity in Salman
Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner (London: Routledge,
2008).
Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1993).
Brooke-Rose, Christine, Stories, Theories, and Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Brouillette, Sarah, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).
Burningham, Bruce, Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Contemporary
Culture (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2008).
Chambers, Iain, and Curti, Linda (eds.), The Post-Colonial Question
(London: Routledge, 1996).
Connor, Steven, The English Novel in History: 1950–95 (London:
Macmillan, 1996).
Cornwell, Neil, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (New
York: Harvester, 1990).
Cronin, Richard, Imagining India (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Dawson, Ashley, Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of
Postcolonial Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Dhawan, R. J. (ed.), Three Contemporary Novelists: Khrishwant Singh,
Chaman Nahal, Salman Rushdie (New Delhi: Classical, 1985).
Doherty, Thomas (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Harvester,
1993).
Gasiorek, Andrzej, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London:
Arnold, 1995).
Gauthier, Tim S., Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations: A. S. Byatt,
Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie (London: Routledge, 2006).
207
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gorra, Michael, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1997).
Hanne, Michael, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change
(Providence: Beghahn, 1994).
Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London:
Methuen, 1981).
Israel, Nico, Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2000).
King, Bruce, (ed.), The Commonwealth Novel since 1960 (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1991).
Kirpal, Viney, The Third World Novel of Expatriation (New Delhi: Sterling,
1989).
_____ The New Indian Novel in English (New Delhi: Allied, 1990).
Kundera, Milan, Testaments Betrayed (London: Faber, 1995).
Lane, Richard J., The Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
Lee, Alison, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1990).
Leigh, David J., Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).
Massie, Alan, The Novel Today (London: Longman, 1990).
McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987).
_____ Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992).
Mehrotra, Arvin Krishna (ed.), A Concise History of Indian Literature in
English (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009).
Moore-Gilbert, Bart (ed.), Writing India 1757–90: The Literature of British
India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
Onega, Susana (ed.), Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing
Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).
Price, David W., History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature,
Poiesis, and the Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
Rai, Sudha, Homeless by Choice: Naipaul, Jhabvala, Rushdie, and India
(Jaipur: Printwell, 1992).
Richetti, John (ed.), The Columbia History of the British Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
Riemenschneider, Dieter (ed.), Critical Approaches to the New Literatures in
English (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1989).
Rubinson, Gregory, The Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson, and Carter
(Jefferson, NC: London: McFarland, 2005).
Scanlan, Margaret, Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar
British Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Shaffer, Brian W. (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–
2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
Sharma, Govind Narain (ed.), Literature and Commitment (Toronto: TSAR
with the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature, 1988).
208
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Simpson, Peter (ed.), The Given Condition: Essays in Post-Colonial Literature
(Christchurch, NZ: 1995).
Singh, R. K. (ed.), Indian English Writing: 1981–5 (New Delhi, Bahri,
1987).
Singh, Sushila (ed.), Feminism and Recent Fiction in English (New Delhi:
Prestige, 1991).
Smyth, Edward (ed.), Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London:
Batsford, 1991).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London:
Routledge, 1993).
Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1992).
Taylor, D. J., After the War: Novel and English Society since 1945 (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1993).
Tiffin, Chris, and Lawson, Alan (eds.), De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism
and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994).
Upstone, Sara Joanne, Chaos and Spatial Politics in the Novels of Wilson
Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie (London: University of
London Press, 2004).
Walsh, William, Indian Literature in English (London: Longman, 1990).
Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious
Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984).
_____ Practising Postmodernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992).
Wheale, Nigel (ed.), Postmodern Arts (London: Routledge, 1995).
White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
Williams, Patrick, and Chrisman, Laura, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993).
Wood, James, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2004).
Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race
(London: Routledge, 1995).
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Faris, Wendy B. (eds.), Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1995).
Articles
This selection lists only a small number of articles on Rushdie; mainly,
those referred to in the present study. See Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie
(pp. 361–96), for an Annotated Bibliography of some 200 Englishlanguage articles, divided into sections on the different novels. Joel
Kuortti’s Salman Rushdie Bibliography lists over 2,000 articles of different
kinds, more than half of which refer to the Rushdie Affair: see below.
209
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Articles on Rushdie appear in a wide variety of journals, those focusing
on law, religion, politics, and race as well as those concerned with
literature, history, and cultural studies.
Al-Azm, Sadik, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman
Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 255–92.
Aravamudan, Srinivas, ‘The Novels of Salman Rushdie: Mediated
Reality as Fantasy’, World Literature Today, 63/1 (1989), 42–5.
_____ ‘ ‘‘Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar’’ ’, in Fletcher (ed.),
Reading Rushdie, 187–208.
Bader, Rudolf, ‘The Satanic Verses: An Intercultural Experiment by
Salman Rushdie’, International Fiction Review, 19 (1992), 65–75.
Balasubramanian, Radha, ‘The Similarities between Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margareta and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’,
International Fiction Review, 22 (1995), 37–46.
Bardolph, Jacqueline, ‘Language is Courage’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 209–20.
Batty, Nancy E., ‘The Art of Suspense: Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-)Nights’, in
Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 69–82.
Bharucha, Rustom, ‘Rushdie’s Whale’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie,
159–72.
Booker, M. Keith, ‘Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the
Fiction of Salman Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 237–54.
Brennan, Timothy, ‘Shame’s Holy Book, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 109–22.
Brigg, Peter, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Novels: The Disorder in Fantastic
Order’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 173–86.
Brouillette, Sarah, ‘Authorship as crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury’,
Journal of Commonwealth Literature (40:1, 2005; 137–56).
Cook, Rufus, ‘Place and Displacement in Salman Rushdie’s Work’, World
Literature Today, 68/1 (1994), 23–8.
Cronin, Richard, ‘The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight’s
Children’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33/2 (1987), 201–13.
Cundy, Catherine, ‘ ‘‘Rehearsing Voices’’: Salman Rushdie’s Grimus’, in
Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 45–54.
Engblom, Philip, ‘A Multitude of Voices: Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 295–305.
Fischer, Michael M., and Abedi, Mehdi, ‘Bombay Talkies, the Word and
the World: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses’, Cultural Anthropology, 5/
2 (1990), 107–59.
Fletcher, M. D., ‘Rushdie’s Shame as Apologue’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 97–108.
François, Pierre, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Philosophical Materialism in The
210
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Satanic Verses’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 305–20.
Grewal, Inderpal, ‘Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame’, in
Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 123–44.
Hawes, Clement, ‘Leading History by the Nose: The Turn to the
Eighteenth Century in Midnight’s Children’, Modern Fiction Studies,
39/1 (1993), 147–68.
Johansen, Ib, ‘The Flight from the Enchanter: Reflections on Salman
Rushdie’s Grimus’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 23–34.
Jones, Peter, ‘The Satanic Verses and the Politics of Identity’, in Fletcher
(ed.), Reading Rushdie, 321–34.
Jussawalla, Feroza, ‘Resurrecting the Prophet: the Case of Salman, the
Otherwise’, Public Culture, 2/1 (1989), 106–17.
_____ ‘Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses as Rushdie’s Love
Letter to Islam’, Diacritics, 26 (1996), 50–73.
Kane, Jean, M., ‘The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History:
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, Contemporary Literature, 37/1
(1996), 94–118.
Merivale, Patricia, ‘Saleem Fathered by Oscar: Intertextual Strategies in
Midnight’s Children and The Tin Drum’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading
Rushdie, 83–96.
Moss, Laura, ‘‘‘Forget those damnfool realists!’’ Salman Rushdie’s SelfParody as the Magic Realist’s ‘‘Last Sigh’’’ Ariel: A Review of
International English Literature (29:4, 1998; 121–39).
Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney, ‘The Politics of Post-Colonial Identity
in Salman Rushdie’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 145–58.
Newell, Stephanie, ‘The Other God: Salman Rushdie’s ‘‘New’’
Aesthetic’, Literature in History, 3rd ser., 1/2 (1992), 67–87.
Parameswaran, Uma, ‘New Dimensions Courtesy of the Whirling
Demons: Word-Play in Grimus’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie,
35–44.
Price, David, ‘Salman Rushdie’s ‘‘Use and Abuse of History’’ in
Midnight’s Children’, Ariel, 25/2 (1994).
Rhombes, N., Jr., ‘The Satanic Verses as Cinematic Narrative’, Literature/
Film Quarterly, 11/1 (1993), 47–53.
Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Reading The Satanic Verses’, Public Culture, 2/1 (1989),
79–99.
Suleri, Sara, ‘Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy’, in Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 221–36.
Syed, Mujeebuddin, ‘Warped Mythologies in Salman Rushdie’s
Grimus’, Ariel, 25/4 (1994), 135–52.
_____ ‘Midnight’s Children and its Indian Con-Texts’, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 29/2 (1994), 95–108.
Wilson, Keith, ‘Midnight’s Children and Reader Responsibility’, in
Fletcher (ed.), Reading Rushdie, 55–68.
211
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE RUSHDIE AFFAIR
Collections of essays, letters, and documents
Appignanesi, Lisa, and Maitland, Sara (eds.), The Rushdie File (London:
ICA/ Fourth Estate, 1989).
Cohn-Sherbok, Dan (ed.), The Salman Rushdie Controversy in InterReligious Perspective (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter: Edward Mellen,
1990).
For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech [no
editor(s) identified] (New York: George Braziller, 1994). First
published as Pour Rushdie: Cent intellectuels arabes et musulmans pour
la liberté d’expression (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1993).
Horton, John (ed.), Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration (London:
Macmillan, 1993).
MacDonogh, Steven (ed.), in association with Article 19, The Rushdie
Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write (Dingle, Co. Derry:
Brandon, 1993). This book includes a section ‘Fiction, Fact, and the
Fatwa’ (pp. 125–83), an ongoing chronicle of events since the fatwa
maintained by Carmel Bedford on behalf of the International
Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie and his Publishers.
Three reports relating to the issue have been published by the
Commission for Racial Equality and the Inter-Faith Network of the
United Kingdom. These are: Law, Blasphemy and the Multi-Faith
Society: Seminar Report, ed. Simon Lee et al. (1990); Free Speech:
Seminar Report, ed. Susan Mendus et al. (1990); Britain: A Plural
Society, ed. Sebastian Poulter et al. (1990).
The continuing series Contemporary Literary Criticism (Detroit: Gale)
published two substantial entries on ‘The Satanic Verses Controversy’
in volumes for 1989 (pp. 214–63), and 1990 (pp. 404–56). See also the
relevant sections in books by Alexander, Connor, Cornwell,
Goonetilleke, Gurnah, Kundera, Spivak, Teverson and Wheale,
listed above.
Among journals to have dedicated special issues to the
affair are:
American Atheist, 31/9 (1989).
Index on Censorship, 18/5 (May 89), and 19/4 (Apr. 90). Index on Censorship
maintains a continuing watch on the affair in its regular feature
‘Index Index’, reviewing censorship issues and events worldwide.
Public Culture, 2/1 (Fall 1989).
Third Text, 11 (Summer 1990): ‘Beyond the Rushdie Affair’.
See also: Tariq Modood, ‘British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair’,
Political Quarterly, 61/2 (Apr. 1990), 143–60.
212
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Relevant monographs include:
Akhtar, Shabbir, Be Careful With Muhammad! The Salman Rushdie Affair
(London: Bellew, 1989).
Easterman, Daniel, New Jerusalems: Reflections on Islam, Fundamentalism,
and the Rushdie Affair (London: Grafton, 1992).
Kuortti, Joel, Place of the Sacred: The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997).
Lee, Simon, The Cost of Free Speech (London: Faber, 1990).
Pipes, Daniel, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah, and the West
(New York: Carol/Birch Lane, 1990).
Ruthven, Malise, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam
(London: Chatto, 1990; republished as A Satanic Affair: Salman
Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam, 1991).
Sardar, Ziauddin, and Davies, Meryl Wyn, Distorted Imagination: Lessons
from the Rushdie Affair (London: Grey Seal, 1990).
Weatherby, William, J., Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death (New York:
Carroll & Graf, 1990).
Webster, Richard, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship, and
‘The Satanic Verses’ (Southwold: Orwell, 1990).
See also the relevant sections in books by Alexander, Connor, Cornwell,
Goonetilleke, Kundera, Spivak, and Wheale, listed above.
213
Index
Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, 86
Ahmad, Aijaz, 17, 18, 57, 182
Al-Azm, Sadik, 20, 24
Allen, Woody, 48
Allende, Isabelle, 18
Amis, Martin, 90
Anderson, Benedict, 6
Aravamudan, Srinivas, 20, 23, 83
Attar, Farid-ud-din, 20
Auden, W. H., 73
Augustine, St., 87
Austen, Jane, 61, 169
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 47
Ballard, J. G., 54
Bardolph, Jacqueline, 26
Barnes, Julian, 3
Barthes, Roland, 141
Baudrillard, Jean, 141
Baum, Frank, 100
Becket, Thomas, 87
Beckett, Samuel, 2, 23, 30, 32, 72,
75, 81, 84, 109, 114, 173
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 145
Bell, Steve, 57
Bellow, Saul, 10
Benjamin, Walter, 106, 122
Bhabha, Homi, 6, 60, 120
Bharucha, Rustom, 24, 26
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 18, 59
Blake, William, 5, 7, 23, 29, 35,
72, 81, 83, 84, 95, 125, 139
Blyton, Enid, 127
Boabdil, King, 108, 109
Bono, 133, 144
Booker, Keith, 57
Borges, Jorge Luis, 96
Bragg, Melvyn, 90
Brennan, Timothy, 16–17, 18, 20,
29, 41, 50, 57, 63, 68, 182
Brigg, Peter, 22
Brouillette, Sarah, 151
Buchner, Georg, 68
Bulgakov, Mikhail, 23, 72, 84
Bunyan, John, 31
Buñuel, Luis, 49
Butler, Samuel, 5
Calvino, Italo, 3
Capriolo, Ettore, 89
Cervantes, Miguel de, 23, 25
Charles I, 73
Christ, 83, 111, 114, 171
Coleridge, S. T., 2, 7, 15, 29, 95,
139, 154
Concilio, Carmen, 146
Connor, Steven, 6, 13, 51, 75, 83
Conrad, Joseph, 24, 49, 54, 91,
177
Cortazar, Julio, 40
Craigie, Jill, 178
Cundy, Catherine, 21, 22, 57, 107
Cunningham, Valentine, 149
Dali, Salvador, 119
Dante Alighieri, 29, 33, 72, 78
Davies, Meryl Wyn, 9
Defoe, Daniel, 23, 84
Desani, G. V., 25–6
Diana, Princess of Wales, 139,
140, 142
Dickens, Charles, 23, 24, 28, 48,
72, 148, 160, 166
Disney, Walt, 145
214
INDEX
Doria, Andrea, 168, 169, 171, 172
Eco, Umberto, 3
Einstein, Albert, 5
Enright, D. J., 12
Eliot, T. S., 80
Herr, Michael, 10
Hesse, Hermann, 29
Hitchens, Christopher, 124
Homer, 31, 129
Hughes, Ted, 23, 29, 84
Igarashi, Hitoshi, 89
Fanon, Frantz, 18
Fenton, James, 94
Fielding, Henry, 15, 23, 27, 120
Fonda, Jane, 137
Forster, E M, 145
Foucault, Michel, 141
Fowles, John, 80
Freud, Sigmund, 5, 77, 180
Fuentes, Carlos, 8, 18, 25
da Gama, Vasco, 73, 108, 110
de Gaulle, Général Charles, 165
Gandhi, Indira, 22, 41, 52, 55,
102, 110, 120, 134
Gandhi, Mahatma, 42
Gandhi, Rajiv, 105
Gandhi, Sanjay, 111
Garland, Judy, 103
Gasiorek, Andrzej, 41, 42, 50
Gilliam, Terry, 4, 5
Gluck, Christophe, 127
Gogol, Nikolai, 25
Gopal, Priyamvada, 125
Gordimer, Nadine, 90
Gorra, Michael, 20
Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 18
Grass, Günther, 23, 25, 90
Greene, Graham, 3
Grierson, John, 178
le Guin, Ursula, 162
Grewal, Inderpal, 21
Hardy, Thomas, 162
Harris, Wilson, 2, 4, 6
Harrison, James, 19, 26, 57
Harrison, Tony, 66
Hawthorne, Nathanael, 130
Hayden, Tom, 137
Heaney, Seamus, 90, 149
Hemingway, Ernest, 91
Henry II, 87
James, Henry, 2, 69, 109, 184
Johansen, Ib, 22
John, Elton, 139
Johnson, Samuel, 2, 155
Jonson, Ben, 148
Joyce, James, 23, 25, 27, 34, 43,
49, 72, 77, 86, 87, 91, 113, 114,
127, 153, 171
Kafka, Franz, 5, 23, 25, 30
Keats, John, 115, 118, 135, 145
Kennedy, J. F., 3, 105, 134
Khan, Ayub, 59
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah,
74, 88
Kipling, Rudyard, 48, 69
Kubrick, Stanley, 151
Kundera, Milan, 17, 20, 25, 91
bin Laden, Osama, 147
Lakshmi, Padma, 123, 124, 125,
150, 151, 169
Lawrence, D. H., 14, 72, 91, 127
Lee, Simon, 91–3
Leithauser, Brad, 19
Lennon, John, 128, 138, 142
Levi, Primo, 80
Locke, John, 5
Lodge, David, 26
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,
136
Lucian, 78
Macchiavelli, Niccolò, 166, 167
Machado de Assis, 25
Mahfouz, Naguib, 89
Mailer, Norman, 138
Mann, Thomas, 145
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 3, 16,
23
215
INDEX
The Jaguar Smile, 6–8, 124
Luka and the Fire of Life, 125,
179–81
Midnight’s Children, 7, 9, 11,
13, 14, 16, 19, 21–4, 26–7,
36, 38–56, 57–8, 60, 63, 67,
72, 95, 99, 107, 110–12, 120,
125, 130, 135, 139, 142, 149,
175, 182, 183
The Moor’s Last Sigh, 13, 48,
63, 65, 107–22, 143, 146,
175, 176
The Satanic Verses, 3, 8, 9, 12,
14, 19–22, 24, 34, 37, 47–8,
59, 63, 70, 71–93, 98, 107,
113, 119, 121, 135, 136, 142,
144, 149, 156, 175, 177
Shalimar the Clown, 124, 158–
66, 176, 178, 183
Shame, 12, 17, 21–2, 26, 57–70,
112, 162, 175
Step Across This Line, 124
Rushdie, Zafar, 94, 123, 125
Ruthven, Malise, 19, 57, 92
Marx, Karl, 5
de Medici, Giuliano, 170
de Medici, Lorenzo, 170
Melville, Herman, 25
Merivale, Patricia, 23
Morris, William, 7
Mountbatten, 1st Earl, 108
Naipaul, V. S., 10
Nandy, Ashis, 24
Needham, Anuradha
Dingwaney, 22
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 120, 134
Newell, Mike, 33
Newell, Stephanie, 20–1
Nygaard, Wilhelm, 89
Okri, Ben, 8
Ono, Yoko, 138
Ortez, Daniel, 6
Orwell, George, 91
Parameswaran, Uma, 23
Parker, Jesse Garron (Elvis
Presley), 131
Parnell, Tim, 19
Powell, Enoch, 105
Proust, Marcel, 148
Pynchon, Thomas, 3
Rabelais, Francois, 20
Robinson, William Heath, 180
Rushdie, Milan, 124, 125, 179,
184
Rushdie, Salman
East, West, 12, 100–06, 117,
175–6
The Enchantress of Florence, 125,
166–74, 176, 177
Fury, 123, 124, 150–8, 173, 178
Grimus, 11, 13, 21–4, 27–37, 61,
63, 135, 175
The Ground Beneath her Feet,
123, 124, 126–46, 148, 149,
175, 177, 183
Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
12, 18, 94–99, 106, 125, 175,
178
Said, Edward, 8, 90
Sandino, Augusto, 7
Sardar, Ziauddin, 9
Scorsese, Martin, 20
Scott, Walter, 38, 183
Shakespeare, William, 38, 64, 69–
70, 72, 80, 106, 111, 115, 119,
143, 145, 160
Shelley, P. B., 1, 7, 118, 175
Shelley, Mary, 26
Sidney, Sir Philip, 47
Smollett, Tobias, 120
Somoza, 6, 7
Spielberg, Steven, 29
Spivak, Gayatri, 19
St Exupéry, Antoine de, 164
Stoppard, Tom, 90
Sterne, Laurence, 2, 5, 15, 17, 23,
39, 51, 54, 76, 172
Stevens, Wallace, 4
Stevenson, R. L., 81
Suleri, Sara, 23–4
Sutherland, John, 124
216
INDEX
Swift, Jonathan, 1–2, 5, 17, 20, 23,
29, 54, 67, 99, 114, 137, 151,
156, 162
Tagore, Rabindranath, 8
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 34
Teverson, Andrew, 183
Thatcher, Margaret, 78
Tolkien, J. R. R., 5, 127
Turner, Ted, 137
Vespucci, Amerigo, 167
Victoria, Queen, 42
Virgil, 72, 78, 127, 139
Vlad the Impaler, 168
Vonnegut, Kurt, 31
Walcott, Derek, 90
Webster, Richard, 9, 92
Wedgwood, C. V., 7
West, Elizabeth, 124
Wilde, Oscar, 18
Wilson, Keith, 19, 23, 42
Winters, Yvor, 148
Wood, James, 126, 184
Wordsworth, William, 47
Woolf, Virginia, 5, 28, 43
Wright, Richard, 5
Yeats, W. B., 7, 23, 139, 149, 153
Zia Ul-Haq, General
Mohammed, 18, 42
Zola, Emile, 2
217