That young man will not be my son but I will make him more than a son. I will make him my hammer and my anvil. I will make him my beauty and my truth. He will stand upon my palm and fill the sky.
As soon as Akbar meets the yellow-haired traveler—who gives his name as “Mogor dell’Amore”—he succumbs to the youth’s charms, despite his suspicion that the traveler may be a charlatan: “How handsome this young man was, how sure of himself, how proud. And there was something in him that could not be seen: a secret that made him more interesting than a hundred courtiers.” As Rushdie presents Akbar, the emperor is both a brooding philosopher-king who questions the tradition into which he has been born—“Maybe there was no true religion…He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the center of things, not god”—and something of a buffoon, a comically inflated megamythic figure:
The emperor AbulFath Jalaluddin Muhammad, King of Kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning “the great,” and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage.
Much of The Enchantress of Florence is couched in such playful tongue-in-cheek bombast, echoing, at far greater length and with far more literary ambition, the comedy of Rushdie’s charming book for children Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), in which folk and fairy tales are genially mocked. (“Here’s another Princess Rescue Story I’m getting mixed up in,” Haroun thought…“I wonder if this one will go wrong, too.”) It isn’t clear when we are to take Akbar seriously and when Rushdie is inviting the reader to laugh at him:
The emperor’s eyes were slanted and large and gazed upon infinity as a dreamy young lady might…His lips were full and pushed forward in a womanly pout. But in spite of these girlish accents he was a mighty specimen of a man, huge and strong. As a boy he had killed a tigress with his bare hands…[He was] a Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms. Such was the greatest ruler the land had ever known.
Though he insists that he is not a tyrant and that he believes that “in the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose” yet Akbar executes the grandson of an old enemy:
Then with a cry—Allahu Akbar, God is great, or, just possibly, Akbar is God—he chopped off the pompous little twerp’s cheeky, didactic, and therefore suddenly unnecessary, head…He was not only a barbarian philosopher and a crybaby killer, but also an egotist addicted to obsequiousness and sycophancy who nevertheless longed for a different world…
What Akbar longs for is the exotic West: which comes to him in the guise of the yellow-haired “Mogor dell’Amore” with a tale to tell so tangled (“This was his way: to move toward his goal indirectly, with many detours and divagations”) it will require hundreds of pages of Rushdie’s challenging prose.
As the yellow-haired traveler and the emperor are so exaggerated as to suggest comic-book figures, so too are Rushdie’s female enchantresses exaggerated to the point of burlesque. Of his numerous queens and mistresses Akbar’s favorite is Jodha, who doesn’t exist at all except as the emperor’s sexual fantasy—“A woman without a past, separate from history, or, rather, possessing only such history as he had been pleased to bestow upon her.” Here is Akbar’s ideal—“mirror”—female.
She was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love…She had marked him with the Three Deep Marks, which were scratches made with the first three fingers of her right hand upon his back, his chest, and on his testicles as well: something to remember her by…She could perform the Hopping of the Hare, marking the areolas around his nipples without touching him anywhere else on his body. And no living woman was as skilled as she at the Peacock’s Foot.
But to Akbar’s anima-self is given the insight about which The Enchantress of Florence is constructed, that Western Europe is enthralled by India, as India is enthralled by Western Europe:
This place, Sikri, was a fairyland to them, just as their England and Portugal, their Holland and France were beyond [Jodha’s] ability to comprehend. The world was not all one thing. “We are their dream,” she told the emperor, “and they are ours.”
And:
The lands of the West were exotic and surreal to a degree incomprehensible to the humdrum people of the East.
At the court of Akbar it is even fantasized that Queen Elizabeth of England is “nothing less than the Western mirror of the emperor himself”:
She was Akbar in female form, and he, the Shahanshah, the king of kings, could be said to be an Eastern Elizabeth, mustachioed, nonvirginal, but in the essence of their greatness they were the same.
As the credulous Akbar becomes immediately infatuated with the yellow-haired Western traveler so he becomes infatuated with the traveler’s (fraudulent) representation of the “faraway redhead queen,” he sends Elizabeth love letters which are never answered declaring his “megalomaniac fantasies of creating a joint global empire that united the eastern and western hemispheres.” In one of those post-modernist flash-forwards intended to break the storyteller’s spell and to remind us as with a nudge in the ribs This is just fiction, a tall tale being told by a veteran performer the bemused omniscient narrator allows us a glimpse of the future:
Near the end of his long reign, many years after the time of the charlatan Mogor dell’Amore had passed, the aging emperor nostalgically remembered that strange affair of [the Queen of En gland]…When the emperor learned the truth he understood all over again how daring a sorcerer he had encountered…By then, however, the knowledge was of no use to him, except to remind him of what he should never have forgotten, that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.1
“Witchcraft” is usually associated with females: in Rushdie’s fevered cosmology these are invariably femmes fatales of the species to which the spectacularly beautiful webspyder Neela Mahendra of Fury belongs. Rushdie wryly mocks what are clearly his own obsessions: the yellow-haired traveler recalls having fallen in love with a Florentine prostitute who was born with only one breast which, “by way of compensation, was the most beautiful breast in the city, which was to say…in all the known world.” Another legendary Florentine beauty is Simonetta Cattaneo who possesses “a pale, fair beauty so intense that no man could look at her without falling into a state of molten adoration, nor could any woman, and the same went for most of the city’s cats and dogs.” Qara Koz, the “Hidden Princess,” said to be a descendent of Genghis Khan and preposterously claimed by the yellow-haired traveler to be his mother, is yet more beautiful, a goddess of beauty, whether in her Mughal identity as “Lady Dark Eyes” or as the “Enchantress of Florence” this paragon of enchantment first appears in a magic mirror owned by the sinister Medici family, as a vision of unearthly beauty, “a visitor from another world” she is meant “for palaces, and kings” when she and her “mirror-self” servant are first glimpsed in Florence, brought back by the (Florentine) warrior-hero Argalia, it’s “as if the Madonna had materialized”:
l’ammaliatrice Angelica, the so-called enchantress of Florence, brought men running from the fields, and women from their kitchens…Woodcutters came from the forests and the butcher Gabburra’s son ran out from the slaughterhouse with bloody hands and potters left their kilns…[T]heir faces shone with the light of revelation, as though in those early days of their unveiling they were capable of sucking light in from the eyes of all who looked upon them and then flinging it out again as their own personal brilliance, with mesmeric, fantasy-inducing effects.
An
d, yet more fantastical:
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. The Dark Lady of Florence.
Somehow, this Mughal princess who has, so far as the reader is allowed to know, never been educated, has learned to speak perfect Florentine Italian, in the modest effort, as her lover Argalia announces to all of Florence:
[Qara Koz] comes here of her own free will, in the hope of forging a union between the great cultures of Europe and the East, knowing that she has much to learn from us and believing, too, that she has much to teach.
This declaration comes out of nowhere for there has been no previous hint that Qara Koz, or the macho warrior-hero Argalia, has the slightest interest or awareness of anything like the “great cultures” of the world: their tales have been Arabian Nights in tone, affably improbable and very far from intellectual. Yet the claim has been made by the yellow-haired traveler who spins out his story at the Mughal court:
When the great warrior Argalia met the immortal beauty Qara Koz…a story began which would regenerate all men’s belief—your belief, grand Mughal…in the undying power and extraordinary capacity of the human heart for love.
“Love” seems a paltry word to describe the stunned adoration everyone in Rushdie’s novel feels for Qara Koz who, even when she is beyond the zenith of her powers of enchantment, as she begins to lose her youth—she’s twenty-six, and had begun her career as a sexual enchantress at seventeen—commands this sort of authority from the macho seafaring adventurer Andrea Doria:
[the princess’s] face was illumined by an unearthly light, so that she reminded Andrea Doria of Christ himself, the Nazarene performing His miracles, Christ multiplying loaves and fishes or raising Lazarus from the dead…Her powers were failing but she intended to exercise them one last time as they had never been exercised before, and force the history of the world into the course she required it to take. She would enchant the middle passage into being by the sheer force of her sorcery and her will…[Andrea Doria] fell to his knees before her…He thought of Christ in Gethsemane and how He must have looked to His disciples as He prepared Himself to die.
Where the enchantress Neela Mahendra of Fury is exposed as a man-eating Erinye, the Mughal princess Qara Koz is revealed as Christ the Savior. From the deconstructionist post-modernist perspective perhaps all myths are equally possible, as all myths are absurd? (In Haroun and the Sea of Stories Haroun’s compulsively storytelling father Rashid confesses: “What to do, son…Storytelling is the only work I know.”
No contemporary writer has so fetishized femaleness as Salman Rushdie, with unflagging zeal, idealism, and irony, in fiction after fiction: Rushdie’s portrait in The Enchantress of Florence of the great Mughal painter Dashwanth would seem to be a self-portrait of the artist so heedlessly infatuated with his subject that he loses his soul to it and disappears into the artwork:
[Dashwanth] was working on what would turn out to be the final picture of the so-called Qara-Koz-Nama, the Adventures of Lady Black Eyes…In spite of the almost constant scrutiny of his peers he had somehow managed to vanish. He was never seen again, not in the Mughal court, nor anywhere in Sikri, not anywhere in all the land of Hindustan.
Eventually, Dashwanth is discovered beneath a border of the portrait, miniaturized, in two dimensions, “crouching down like a little toad…Instead of bringing a fantasy woman to life, Dashwanth had turned himself into an imaginary being, driven…by the overwhelming force of love.”
By the novel’s end the “barren” Mughal princess has been absorbed into the emperor Akbar’s khayal, “his god-like omnipotent fancy” having taken the place of his fantasy-queen Jodha. Even the most extraordinary female in the history of mankind is finally just a man’s fancy, as Qara Koz has been the author’s:
“I have come home after all,” she told [Akbar]. “You have allowed me to return, and so here I am, at my journey’s end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours.”
Until you’re not, the Universal Ruler thought. My love, until you’re not.
How wonderfully ironic, and appropriate, that in the final lines of Rushdie’s ingeniously constructed post-modernist “romance” the fevered sex-spell is finally broken: male omnipotence out-trumps the most powerful female sorcery, in time.
Amid this exotic Arabian Nights romance of hidden princesses, lonely emperors and brash young travelers from the West is a second romance, almost entirely separate from the first, a highly eroticized male romance involving the storyteller Vespucci’s boyhood friends in Florence in the later years of the fifteenth century, one of whom is destined to become the celebrated and controversial author of The Prince: “In the beginning there were three friends, Antonino Argalia, Niccolò ‘il Machia,’ and Ago Vespucci.” This story-opening is repeated several times through the hundreds of pages of The Enchantress of Florence as the story moves away from Florence, then returns; and moves away, and returns; and finally moves away again, to vanish into the Mughal emperor’s all-absorbing khayal. Since the storyteller is Ago Vespucci (who has renamed himself “Niccolò”) it’s within his power to shift his scene at will, to evoke the past, or the future, to challenge the reader’s capacity to keep characters straight by frequently renaming them, and to gleefully, tirelessly digress—how like Haroun’s storyteller father the “Shah of Blah” for whom “straight answers were beyond [his] powers…who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.” After a boyhood that seems to have been spent largely fantasizing over “having occult powers over women”—“in the woods most days climbing trees and masturbating for mandrakes and telling each other insane stories”—both Argalia and Vespucci leave Florence and become high-concept adventurers (Argalia becomes Pasha Avcalia the Turk, a warrior for the Ottoman empire; Vespucci becomes a world traveler) while the more intellectual and politically ambitious Niccolò “il Machia” remains behind, a brooding (if bawdy) center of skeptical consciousness meant to mirror the philosopher-king Akbar. Though the two men never meet they are kindred spirits—Niccolò Machiavelli would have been another of Akbar’s “sons,” had Akbar known him—questioning religious tradition and the culture in which each has been born as well as the nature of human identity. These words of the young Machiavelli would be appropriate for Akbar as well:
He believed in the hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that the truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of which were aspects of the surface deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the whatness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.
Similarly Akbar, when he is not required by the author to play the buffoon-despot or the credulous fool taken in by a yellow-haired Westerner’s tall tale:
It is man at the center of things, not god. It is man at the heart and the bottom and the top, man at the front and the back and the side, man the angel and the devil, the miracle and the sin, man and always man, and let us henceforth have no other temples but those dedicated to mankind. This was his unspeakable ambition: to found the religion of man.
It may be doubtful that the historic Akbar the Great ever thought such post-Enlightenment thoughts but Rushdie eloquently provides him with the most chilling possibility of all, by which the tragic timeliness of The Enchantress of Florence—and the author’s intention in writing it—is underscored:
(If man had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it possible for a creation to escape the power of the creator? Could a god, once created, become impossible to destroy? Did such fictions acquire an autonomy of the will that made them immortal?…)
He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as “I,” not even in private…He was—what else could he be?—“we.” He was the definition, the Incarnation of the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said “we” he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes…he meant himself as the apogee of his people’s past and present, and the engine of their future…[But] could he, too, be an “I?” Could there be an “I” that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary “I’s” buried beneath the overcrowded “we’s” of the earth?
(Ironically, when Akbar tries to establish himself as an “I” separate from the “we” of his role as emperor, he is rebuffed by his fantasy-queen Jodha, his mirror-self.)2
Though his role in the novel is a minor and muted one, Machiavelli emerges as the novel’s most intriguing character, for Rushdie has given him a distinctly contemporary personality and keeps him, for the most part, free of the distracting romance-plot with its typically inflated and jocose prose; Machiavelli is the quintessential Renaissance Florentine, a mixture of the high-minded and the lasvicious (“Il Machia…seemed to be the reincarnation of the god Priapus, always ready for action” 3) involved in political scheming even in his youth, and highly ambitious; when the Medicis ascend to power in Florence with the election of a Medici Pope, Machiavelli falls into disfavor, and, in scenes Rushdie chooses not to dramatize, terribly tortured. His spirit is broken:
In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews Page 17