BY PER GIOTTO
One may, with little considerable effort, trace within the oeuvre of Salman Rushdie a near-encyclopedic effort to emblematize femininity through variously representative wiles and sentiments, to – through a thoroughly unmodern consideration of womanhood – position his female characters as stable proxies for ostensibly every single element comprising the breadth of the human condition. These women are postured so precisely to fulfill this emblematic role that, on the rare occasion in which one of his female characters punctures her shell of symbolhood, it seems an oversight on Rushdie’s part, as if he had suddenly lost his authorial command and allowed a woman to, however momentarily, align herself to humanity: he creates such statically allegorical women figures that when one of them strikes the reader as an actual human being, it seems as though Rushdie is engaging in nothing short of prosopopeia. In his latest novel he continues this trend, while in his latest film appearance he plays a gynecologist. Artistically, it is latter work, Then She Found Me, that finds Rushdie engaging in what is for him more difficult terrain: he portrays a man who must consider the very real, very serious, very unallegorical implications and essentials of womanhood. It is his most fantastical creation to date.
One gets the impression that women represent to Rushdie femininity as it should be, that they symbolize the matchless adversary – whether in love or war, but particularly in love – that he so desires, thusly idealized if only so as to make life, for him, a little easier. He seems of a kind with Pygmalion, creating his subjective perfection and willing it into existence – through his novels – among his schlubby, entirely un-idealized men, who more often than not seem based in large part upon their author. Unfortunately for Rushdie, his pagan prayers have gone unanswered: his Galatea is one not only of an impossibly over-fetishized feminine perfection; she is also utterly out of grip with any modern sensibilities. His women are tropes of classical femininity; they are signifiers bereft of any living signifieds. The unrepentant, unremitting presence of these women in his novels seems a hopelessly hopeful gesture in the face of a world that refuses to yield to his vision, that leaves his cries for his creations’ flesh made warm and pliant wailing lonesome and unfulfilled in the stridently modern night. So much the better for us, to live in a world of real people; but one cannot help but feel a twinge of pity for the author’s futile efforts.
Rushdie has proven a staid adherent to invariability not only in his treatment of women as the emblems of mankind; this model also typifies his conception of storytelling, the occupation – leisurely and for profit, variously taken – that he holds dearest and most exuberantly to his heart. It is a curious tendency of his, one that belies the playfulness of his prose style and the high-spirited friskiness of his plots. He sees storytellers as the natural heirs to Scheherazade – a figure he frequently alludes to in his novels – and storytelling as perhaps the one human creation that bears within it the possibility of finally uniting everyone together: the unspooling yarn as the sole means by which to stitch together the citizens of this planet in a peaceful pastiche of mesmerized tranquility.
He certainly suggests as much in his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florencee, in which a young Italian man – initially referred to as Ago Vespucci but later endowed with a great several more monikers – is expelled from his native Western land for telling stories of unacceptable immodesty and fortuitously taken in by the West-besotted Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great, a figure with an insatiable appetite for tales of this Other State from which Ago, always prepared with an inexhaustible smorgasbord of exotic fancies, originates. The two take on roles analogous to those of Scheherazade and Shahryar, although the latter makes a less comfortable fit with the Mughal emperor. Akbar the Great is the more common name to which Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar – the transliteration that Rushdie employs – is referred, and Rushdie makes appropriately greater and more frequent use of the nickname: this Akbar is a grand man with the grandest, least nuanced of sensibilities, and he is rendered with wonderful majesty. He is not an historical personality: perhaps Rushdie is skeptical of the entire endeavor of history-making and historical narratives and this is his satire of any such attempt, although nothing explicit within the novel would particularly suggest this. Rather, Akbar is – the author wants no doubt left in his readers’ minds – an utter, fabulous fabrication concocted by the grandiose mind of Salman Rushdie.
One can understand well what would have initially drawn Rushdie to the historical figure of Akbar the Great: aside from having lived in a momentously lively artistic and intellectual period, one mirrored, in a sense – and certainly noted in this novel –, by Medici Italy, Akbar proved himself a ruler unusually taken by the arts and almost pre-Enlightenment sensibilities; he even created his own religion, Din-i-Ilahi, which combined elements of the existing faiths under the Mughal Empire into a short-lived, seemingly arbitrary composite religion. In many ways, he was much like a Rushdie novel made manifest in flesh; perhaps here lies his Galatea.
The gross broadness in which Akbar is handled, however, seems more an effort to place him firmly as his novel’s Shahryar than to explore his particularly fascinating life and reign. Rushdie does discuss many of the more interesting elements of Akbar’s life and delve occasionally into the fancies of his mind. More often than not it is in a fantastical manner, as in his creation of – somewhat predictably – a perfect, imaginary, female specimen; but he also allows Akbar to muse, as the real emperor had, on religious toleration and, even on the question of whether any gods had – or could have – existed before man. His rendering of Akbar’s theological ponderings are not particularly concerned with doing justice to the real emperor’s profound meditations on faith – they are more often charming than provocative, more given to twenty-first century approaches to the matter than one placed in its proper historical context – but Rushdie by no means avoids this element of the Mughal emperor’s life, often investing it with an invigorating exigency. Nonetheless, Akbar has the feel of a prop, of nothing more than a stand-in Shahryar to Ago’s Scheherazade.
Ago fulfills the role of the character type with whom, or with the thought of, Rushdie seems most comfortable: that of the garrulous storyteller, one so adept at his oratorical skills as to keep those lucky enough to be near his volubility in hushed astonishment. He is someone we have seen before, not just in Scheherazade, but also in the Shah of Blah, from Rushdie’s earlier novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Indeed, Blah is something Rushdie cherishes in storytelling, perhaps above all else: he loves a good, long yarn, with moments to scare, others to amuse, and always others – if he could, an infinitude of others – to cull from its listeners the full gamut of human emotion. The similarities of their storytelling techniques are striking: Ago aims, in his tales, to “move toward his goal indirectly, with many detours and divagations,” while the Shah of Blah “would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.” Both are, in technique as well as calling, firmly the children of Scheherazade’s rhetorical proclivities.
The problem is that Rushdie seems incapable of considering any other form of storytelling, of imagining that those without a gift for divagations might nonetheless be worthy raconteurs; furthermore, with the precedent of Scheherazade’s cunning use of stories firmly in mind – she kept Shahryar’s murderous desires at bay by entrancing him in a series of tales that would never end, always postponing his homicidal duties –, Rushdie seems to attribute to this fashion the virtue of peacekeeper. His own divulgations, however, serve no theoretical or stylistic purposes beyond those of what it seems he imagines true storytelling must be; even his most controversial works are more mischievously tongue-in-cheek than they are series considerations of the topics at hand. Those who place him in the post-modernist tradition of writers have it somewhat backwards: he does not play with personages and events, both fictional and real, for the purpose of upending or otherwise exploring, investigating, or teasing out of them any intrinsic characteristics that then form the conceptual structure of his works. Rather, he uses these personages and events solely as further detours in his stories. Even The Satanic Verses, despite the controversies surrounding it, is not an explicitly revisionist tale; it is, like most of his novels, an enjoyable, frolicsome farce, its widely and wildly component parts and characters variously suggestive of many things – wariness and mockery of Islam, and religion, certainly among them – but never concerted enough so as to make an actual case of anything. His novels – like the stories of Scheherazade, the Shah of Blah, and Ago – squirm and swivel through time and a bevy of characters, and they seem to have a bawdy blast all the way to their concluding period marks. What separates Rushdie from the authors with whom he is most often associated – Grass and García Márquez perhaps most consistently – is that his social, cultural, and political leanings – and he does have and express them – find little outlet in his work. On the contrary, he seems to consider storytelling a universal art that outweighs all distinctions among the people and societies of the earth, and storytelling – like his female figures – is utterly static and unmoving in its tenets and traits: the goal, always, is fun and diversion, with some heuristic elements to make the digressions worthwhile. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the work that, with The Enchantress of Florence, most explicitly delineates Rushdie’s conception of storytelling and the storytelling muse, the Ocean of a far-off realm called Kahani – “story,” in Hindi – is the source of all stories ever known, and ever to be known, to mankind. In other words, all stories – by virtue of their provenance – transcend cultural, social, and political divides; they are universal in a manner that little else is. And as fantastical and cheeky as this is, it seems among the most honest explications of Rushdie’s worldview to be found in any of his novels. He is, in this way, an anachronistic anomaly among contemporary writers: he is not forward-thinking in his approach to storytelling, although he has adopted many modernist and post-modernist techniques. Rather, he has used these techniques to move backward, to write as if he were a Scheherazade without a Shahryar to worry him. His work is not, as many would have it, 1001 Nights by way of a post-modernist ethos; he is post-modernism by way of a 1001 Nights.
It is instructive to look at what was undoubtedly one of the most troubling events in Rushdie’s life – and the life of modern literature – to help gauge where his persistence in honoring the divagatious storyteller first arose: the fatwa, calling for the author’s assassionation, that Ayatollah Khomenei ordered after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Undoubtedly, this incident had a tremendously painful impact on Rushdie’s life; indeed, the entire literary community – particularly that of the West, which had been largely untouched by such dangerous oppression and vicious forms of censorship before this moment – reeled from it, and its impact – particularly with the West’s growing familiarity with the Middle East – is by no means of the past. Nonetheless, it is somewhat disheartening to see that Rushdie seems to have not scrutinized this momentously upsetting occasion by delving further into what storytelling – in the vastness of its methods, techniques, usages, and models – can mean to different cultures and civilizations; rather, the occasion seems to have been one that solidified the author’s conviction in the necessary unity of storytelling and its effects and purposes. He turned the fatwa into a rallying-cry against censorship – not fault-worthy in its own right – while his foundation in the essential rightness of post-Enlightenment beliefs became firmer. He seemed to develop no notable or expressed interest in examining what stories mean between and beyond different cultures and religions. This is, in many respects, entirely understandable: having had such unfathomable hatred foisted upon oneself, one would be quite naturally averse to the rationales of those pronouncing and promulgating this intolerance; but it does also seem to suggest a certain shortcoming in intellectual curiosity: he was and has been unwilling or incapable of taking the event as something from which he can gauge insight into non-Western or Enlightenment-based cultures, communities, and civilizations and the roles that storytelling plays within them. Perhaps the alkaline stench of Khomenei’s illiberality tainted the cultures that are typically – and often wrongly – associated with his dogmatism. And so, with each passing novel, a new storyteller – variously disguised, if at all – becomes increasingly heroic, while the villains – those predisposed to an intolerance of storytelling of any kind – become increasingly villainous. All of Rushdie’s post-Verses heroes seem to have been Rushdie, while all of their villains have been Khomenei.
Rushdie’s stubbornly static approach to both narrative storytelling and femininity would not be so troublesome were there nothing particularly at stake in his novels. However, there always is; and, more worrisomely, his perception of these two salient themes, which run through his entire work, seems to be ossifying – like his heroes and villains – with each new novel. Midnight’s Children is a powerful, unique, and provocative account of Indian independence and partition; it has since gained tribute as among the greatest of two dubiously named and codified literary “movements”: magical realism and post-colonial literature. Since this milestone in his career, however, the post-modernist elements of his works – widely referential meta-narrative techniques that have also aligned him, with a similar dubious simplicity, with John Barthes and Robert Coover – have gained the innocuous weight of rote necessity, as if he felt that each subsequent work needed to utilize the associative elements of his first major success in order to assure that of his later ones. The allusions that in Midnight’s Children are used as such evocative refrains, such as that of 1001 Nights, become more laborious the more constant a presence they seem to occupy in his work.
Furthermore, each of his novels at the very least attempts to address a pressing issue of the current moment or recent past; in Enchantress the primary one is of an East-West divide, certainly something of extraordinary urgency – and something which must be treated very delicately – in this particular era. Rushdie’s evocation of this gulf is staggering in its simplicity; much as he enjoys complexity in storytelling structure and form, he seems unnerved by its persistence in the political, social, and cultural realms. In an assessment that serves to suggest a parallelism through an equivalent dissimilarity, it is stated in this novel that the “lands of the West were exotic and surreal to a degree incomprehensible to the humdrum people of the East.” Rushdie does not seem to be attempting simply to turn traditional Western exoticism of the East on its head but instead to be asserting a likeminded reverence and curiosity for each region’s elusive Other. This seems further compounded when the Queen of England is described as “nothing less than the Western mirror of the emperor himself.” It seems, initially, as though Rushdie could be preparing the viewer for a satirical skewering of East-West dichotomization, but he ultimately upholds it, only asserting, limply, that they could coexist more tranquilly were their similarities, rather than their differences, embraced. The best method by which to do this, Rushdie characteristically asserts, is through the transcendent power of storytelling, as the singularized entity he has fashioned it to be.
It is one of the female characters in Enchantress – two of the primary ones are either fabrications of a male mind within the novel, as is Akbar’s imaginary lover Jodha, or without, as is Qara Köz, Rushdie’s characteristically perfect female – who, advocating an earlier assertion that “the curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so similar,” carries out her role as enchantress “in the hope of forging a union between the great cultures of Europe and the East.” To the former assessment one may wish to respond, “Genetically, yes; but culturally, socially, politically: far from it,” and yet one senses that Rushdie truly believes such a unity to be possible; while his optimism is endearing and appealing, the naïveté with which it is asserted is bewildering. He views storytelling – as Scheherazade utilized it – as a means by which the problems of the world may be corrected. In a brief glimpse into the future, a point after which Ago had long since left Akbar, it is stated that emperor has come to the realization “that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.” And certainly there is truth to this: language can be utterly enchanting. But is this what makes a story worthwhile, or profitable: enchantment? What he fails to seem to consider, ultimately, is if enchantment is enough.
