Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  The two now team up as a super-successful rock band, but again Ormus’s request of marriage (in this at least he knows who he wants to be) is rejected. Despite her love, the sassy Vina has no intention of renouncing her promiscuous nature. At this point Ormus forces a pact on her: they will not touch each other for ten years, during which time he will remain celibate, but at the end of that period they will marry. Throughout these ten years Vina continues to sleep with Rai, though Ormus, who is aware of her more casual lovers, never knows this.

  Finally, the now amazingly famous rock stars marry. All continues as before without revelations, confrontations or any particular development, until Ormus’s intensifying psychic obsessions eventually become too much for his wife. Ormus is convinced that two worlds (apparently that of the book and our own world outside the book) are involved in a progressive collision that is causing socio-political upheaval and indeed earthquakes. Vina walks out on him and Rai is encouraged to believe he can at last break up the official couple and win his woman. To this end he follows Vina on her first solo tour, but at precisely the point where a decision must be made she disappears in an earthquake in Mexico, thus somewhat validating her husband’s nightmare prophecies.

  The dynamic of the triangle has potential. All three characters are presented as in search of the solid ground of identity. Of himself the narrator says: “at my worst I have been a cacophony, a mass of human noises that did not add up to the symphony of an integrated self. The racially mixed Vina with her miserable infancy is “a rag bag of selves, torn fragments of people she might have become’. Ormus has serious identity crises resulting from his belief that he is in some way inhabited by the personality of his stillborn twin, Gayomart. These are less positive presentations of the multiple self. All three protagonists sense that the dramatic gesture of choice and (above all) exclusiveness in love will confer a longed-for identity. But Vina in particular is also aware that exclusive love can be coercive and limiting, and it is she who allows the triangle to form and deliberately perpetuates it over thirty years, thus keeping all three characters in a state of tension, on the brink of an identity that is never quite established.

  The scenario, as I said, is promising and from time to time Rushdie launches into some penetrating reflections on the conflicting claims of identity, love and trust, in life and in art. He has read widely and thought a great deal. But he seems unable or unwilling to dramatise these relationships in a way that would allow us to savour their emotions and dilemmas. In the end almost none of the book’s action or energy springs from them. His twin vocations for multiplicity and hyperbole work against the prolonged and concentrated meditation needed to bring the inner life of a love triangle onto the page. Just as Ormus Cama is reluctant to choose between conflicting personalities, so Rushdie is determined not to settle on one form or another of the novel. His choice of the first person, for example, with all its scope for transmitting the pathos of a frustratingly limited knowledge, offers an excellent approach to his story. But its conviction soon dwindles when Rushdie allows his narrator inside other characters’ heads and starts using him, and them, as the merest of mouthpieces for his own many ideas and areas of interest. A section where the largely uneducated and very adolescent Vina is allowed to be an authority on Bombay cinema interiors is particularly unconvincing, and dull to boot. One moment we are being given a lecture on Neoplatonism, then the narrative suddenly slips into cartoon flippancy full of pun and rhyme, only to clang out at the end of a paragraph with some portentous eschatological warning. Rather than a convincing voice, or the continuation (for the claim is frequently made) of a satisfying oral tradition, this only reminds us of certain prevailing and largely literary notions of the modern. In short, and again like his rock star Ormus, Rushdie makes no secrets of playing all the instruments. ‘Here comes everybody’ - an improbable quotation from Finnegans Wake, afforded through a first-person narrator (not present when the words were spoken) to a young Indian rock musician - thus tends to mean, here comes Salman.

  While the mixed and hybrid is justified both by its liberal openness and its reflection of a contemporary global situation, Rushdie’s insistent use of hyperbole is to take us to those extremes where nature may betray what lies beyond the ‘curtain of maycC. The two vocations come together in the book’s use of mythology. Inflated by frequent comparison to mythological figures taken from both Western and Eastern traditions, Ormus and Vina, Eastern practitioners of what we have always thought of as a Western musical form, are to be held up as potential archetypes, suggesting a deep pattern of truth beneath the superficial clutter of daily reality. Typical passages read thus: ‘Glistening serpents of hair lay across the wooden veranda. Medusa. It crossed my mind [Rai is referring to a time when he was nine years old] that we should look at her [Vina’s] face only in a burnished shield lest we be turned to stone.’ Or again: ‘Many different versions of the first encounter between Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama are presently in circulation … depending on which journal you read you might have heard that he transformed himself into a white bull and carried her away on his back …’

  These mythological allusions are then set off against the narrator’s declared scepticism to generate a dialectic between two opposed interpretations of life, the one usually, though not exclusively, associated with the mystical East, the other with the rationalist tradition of the West. The two views come into most immediate conflict in Rai’s relationship with the mythical and myth-hungry Vina. Of her interest in the sacred music of India, the narrator announces: ‘I must conclude - and this is hard for a lifelong sceptic like me to write - that what Vina wanted was a glimpse of the unknowable.’

  However interesting Rushdie’s intentions - and there can be little doubt that he means this to be the intellectual core of the book - the dialectic never convinces. The project is dogged by two extravagant decisions, or perhaps they might best be described, within the terms of Rushdie’s poetics, as protracted ‘indecisions’. The first involves the sheer weight of mythical reference that is foisted upon the central characters (all of whom are themselves remarkably well versed in both Western and Eastern mythologies). Vina, for example, a girl whose father turned gay and abandoned her mother who later hanged herself after slaughtering her second husband and his family (Rushdie is anything but ungenerous with background), a girl, then, whose early life is presented along the lines of the most gruesome and sensationalist ‘realism’, will be compared with (among others): Medusa, Cinderella, Eurydice, the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, Europa, Rati (wife of the Indian god of love), Helen of Troy, an apsara (semi-divine nymph in Indian mythology), Pallas Athena, Psyche, Dionysus, Galatea und Pygmalion.

  The same wearisome profligacy of interconnection is afforded both to other characters and to the book’s many events. (Of one girl who predicts an earthquake we read: “If she was our Cassandra, then maybe - just maybe - Bombay was about to fall like Troy.’) Instead of finding a suggestive and potentially convincing structure in myth, the reader begins to suspect only fuzzy thinking and overkill. It may be that the problem of establishing the characters’ identities is more Rushdie’s than theirs.

  The other obstacle set before our engagement with this presentation of rival interpretations of reality is the decision to have our sceptical narrator give credence to events that, if accepted as factual, eliminate a priori the very possibility of scepticism. Of Ormus Cama we read that ‘within moments of his birth (he) began making the strange, rapid finger movements with both hands which any guitarist could have identified as chord progressions’. These movements, Rai tells us, were filmed and are now available on video. Later we learn that Ormus (his name is a Latin hybridisation of the Zoroastrian god Ormazd or Ahura Mazda), in contact with his dead twin Gayomart (another Zoroastrian figure), is being given the words and music to many of the greatest rock songs exactly two years, eight months and twenty-eight days before they are released in the West. He actually plays ‘Yesterday’ as his own song in a Bombay club bef
ore it appears as the work of the Beatles. Rai remarks: ‘I am the least supernaturally inclined of men, but this tall story I have no option but to believe.’ While the inspiration here is presumably comic, the result in terms of the book’s larger debate is that the position of the sceptic is untenable and the proposed dialectic spurious. It is rather as if Browning’s Karshish were to declare his familiarity with well-documented miracles before being presented with the enigma of the resurrected Lazarus.

  Critics championing Rushdie will often suggest that we have difficulty understanding him because we are unfamiliar with the tradition he is working in (though they rarely remark that he is most successful precisely where that tradition is least understood). It would seem appropriate then to consider how he uses some of his Indian material.

  Alienated from family affections ‘like an astronaut floating away from a space capsule’, Ormus Cama is saved by Vina Apsara’s love. Rai remarks in a long parenthesis:

  (It is said that when Kama, the love god, committed the crime of trying to shoot mighty Shiva with a dart of love, the great god burned him to ashes with a thunderbolt. Kama’s wife, the goddess Rati, pleaded for his life, and softened Shiva’s heart. In an inversion of the Orpheus myth, it was the woman who interceded with the deity and brought Love - Love itself -back from the dead … So also Ormus Cama, exiled from love by the parents whom he had failed to transfix with love’s arrow, shrivelled by their lack of affection, is restored to the world of love by Vina.)

  Even those unfamiliar with Indian myth will have grounds for suspecting that the analogy cannot hold. Kama’s attempt to shoot a love dart at Shiva is presented as a crime, while it could hardly be considered a crime for Ormus to seek affection from his parents. The reference to darts should also alert us to the fact that Kama is akin to the Greek Eros and has nothing at all to do with filial love. One does not fire off Eros’s arrows at one’s folks (there has been no suggestion of a desire for incest!). The parallel thus becomes doubly inappropriate, indeed triply so if one further considers that while Rati can only appeal to Shiva’s clemency, Vina saves Ormus directly herself. Nor could it be claimed that this distortion is a deliberate attempt on Rushdie’s part to develop the character of his narrator Rai, whose erudition, on the contrary, appears to be coextensive with his author’s and whose point of view generally coincides with Rushdie’s as presented in interviews. Some two hundred pages later Rushdie remembers that his narrator is sceptical of these mythological interpretations and gives us this: ‘When Vina starts with her fanciful mysteries, all you can do is lie back and wait for her to lose interest, which never takes too long. Here she is, back again at the story of Kama and Rati.’ But previously it was Rai/Rushdie using this particular analogy, not Vina/Rushdie.

  The story of Kama and Rati is worth considering in a little more detail. Warned by Brahma that they would be destroyed by the anti-god Taraka unless Shiva bore a son to destroy him, the gods begged Kama to shoot one of his darts at Shiva so that he would fall in love with the girl Parvati who could then bear the great creator and destroyer a son. The idea of crime doesn’t enter into it. Unimpressed, Shiva shrivelled Kama with a blaze from his famous third eye (not with a thunderbolt). At this point versions diverge, some suggesting Kama was brought back to life and others saying not. But the two can be reconciled in the version that tells us how Kama was brought back only to a dispersed and invisible life. In his recent work on Indian mythology, Ka, Roberto Calasso comments on the story thus: ‘Flowers, bees, mangoes, cuckoos: it was into you that Desire [Kama] dispersed when Shiva’s blaze consumed him. Henceforth a humming or a birdcall, a flavour or a scent, would open a wound in those far from their loved ones.’ Calasso concludes with a quotation from the fifth-century poet Kalidasa. ‘And many were wounded if it is true that “upon seeing things of great beauty or hearing sweet sounds even a happy man may be seized by a fierce nostalgia.’“

  The myth will perhaps help us to shift the debate on our reaction to Rushdie’s work to more pertinent ground than that of the sterile back and forth of whether or not we can appreciate Indian tradition. Fantastical as it is, Kama’s story illuminates a landscape we recognise all too well. There is an attempt, an erotic attempt, to coerce the great power that drives the universe. It fails miserably. Erotic love is helpless in the face of necessity. However far from realism, myth, unlike some contemporary fiction, always has a very strong sense of what is possible and what is not - hence the irony of Rushdie’s using this story to suggest the power of love, rather than its weakness. Yet something is gained from that attempt and its defeat. The natural world takes on a splendid, if painful sweetness. This too we recognise, and our recognition is the token both of the myth’s conviction and its seduction. We feel we inhabit the world it describes.

  Do we expect our fiction, in whatever form it comes, to have powers of clarification and evocation, to thrill us by getting close to the grain of our inner life, our most intimate and enigmatic experiences; or do we wish it merely to end up proclaiming that famous one-word ‘prophesy’ Sal Paradise in On the Rond imagines himself as bringing to his friends in a bar in downtown Denver: ‘Wow!’? Again and again in The Ground Beneath Her Feet Rushdie deploys the rhetoric of clear-sightedness. Relentlessly and accurately he satirises, ‘the swallowing of various forms of gibberish that has replaced the exercise of intelligence’. But having satisfied readers, he hopes, that they are in the hands of the world’s least credulous person, he then proceeds, equally relentlessly, to offer nothing more than the most muddled and spuriously mystical of melodramas, the very thing he had appeared to be satirising.

  Admirably energetic as he is alarmingly approximate, here is our author towards the end of the book drawing on the work of one of the sharpest minds the world ever produced: Plato. Vina’s father Shetty has just remarked that if Ormus really wants to be with his dead wife, the noble thing to do would be ‘to shoot himself in the mouth’. Ever ready to instruct, narrator Rai remarks:

  Shetty doesn’t know it, but he’s echoing Plato. This is what the great philosopher has Phaedrus say in the Symposium’s first speech about love: The gods honour zeal and heroic excellence towards love. But Orpheus, they sent back unfulfilled from Hades, showing him a phantom of the woman … because he seemed to them a coward … [who] didnt venture to die for the sake of love, as did Alcestis, but rather devised a means of entering Hades while still alive. Orpheus, the despised citharode - the singer with the lyre or, let’s say guitarist - the trickster who uses music and wiles to cross boundaries, between Apollo and Dionysus, man and nature, truth and illusion, reality and the imagination, even between life and death, was evidently not to austere Plato’s taste. Plato, who preferred martyrdom to mourning, Plato the ayatollah of love.’

  We shall pass over the bullying techniques of agglomeration and inflation everywhere evident in this prose. Here it is the sheer rashness of Rushdie’s writing that takes the breath away. I shall not presume to come to Plato’s defence; the most cursory reading of the Symposium witty, fluent, ever as precise as it is profound, will show how inappropriate these remarks are. In contrast, the imprecision of Rushdie’s work - Alcestis is not a martyr - is, at this point, no more than we expected. Yet one would have thought that he would have hesitated a moment before the word ‘ayatollah’. There at least, one would have expected a moment’s attention, a truly pertinent comment. Not so. The temptation of the flourish is too much for him. Plato is the ‘ayatollah of love’. At one point in The Ground Beneath Her Feet a minor character speaks of myth as ‘the software of universal consciousness’. Are we then to refer to Rushdie as ‘the Bill Gates of mythology’? Or, since a good parallel should be reversible, can we from now on think of the ayatollah as the Plato of Islam?

  We live in an age where initiation into the mysteries of a religion or cult has very largely been replaced by initiation into the notion that there is no such mystery into which to be initiated. As it turns out this may prove to be the hardest initiation of all
into the most trying of mysteries. By making the double gesture of appearing clear-sighted and then filling his pages with supernatural incident and metaphysical muddle that could mean anything or nothing, Rushdie appeals to those who, while understandably unwilling to subscribe to any belief so well defined as to be easily knocked down, nevertheless yearn to have all the mystical balls kept perpetually spinning in the air before them. Closet New Agers will be thrilled. The potential readership is huge.

  Surviving Giacomo

  [Giacomo Leopardi]

  His mother rejoiced when her children died in infancy. They would go straight to heaven and would not weigh upon the family budget. Faith and thrift would always be problems for Giacomo. His father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, had squandered the family fortune through ‘generosity, pride, or folly’ and was deprived by papal order of the right to handle money. Pious and penny-pinching, his wife, Marchesa Adelaide, took over the management of their estates. This was in 1803, on the dusty hills above the southern Adriatic, scorching in summer, freezing in winter. The noble couple were in their mid-twenties and their first-born son just five.

  To assert offended manhood, Monaldo cultivated literary ambitions - an interminable production of bigoted and reactionary tracts - which it was felt could not lead to the same economic catastrophe as his previous sallies into politics and trade. Nevertheless, he lavished considerable sums on building up what, for the very small town of Recanati, was a vast library of 25,000 volumes. Through this library he entered into a relationship with young Giacomo that was at once one of complicity, against Adelaide, and competition, with each other. For the next thirty years, when Giacomo the poet asked Monaldo the pamphleteer for money, Monaldo could make a point of surreptitiously conceding it to a fellow sufferer behind his wife’s stiff back, or of informing his young rival that he would have to confront the formidable matriarch in person.