History vs. ideas

OR: Short and poorly constructed thoughts on the work of Salman Rushdie

I never really intended to own the complete works of Salman Rushdie, seriously – it was just one of those things that happened. You know how it goes – acquaintance expresses an interest in Rushdie, wife mentions said interest to mother, who volunteers at the Raleigh library system’s sales of de-circulated books and as such gets first crack; acquaintance hems and haws about coming by to pick up the books, then vanishes, and next thing you know, your bookshelves are groaning under the weight of a mess of hardback novels. Hating to see books go unread, despite the fact that your knowledge of Salman consists of the knowledge that he had had a fatwa ordered for his assassination by Khomani for interpreted heresy in his novel The Satanic Verses, you plunge in.

I’ve read four novels at this point (Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet), and reviews are decidedly mixed. Much of my feelings about his writing echo my feelings about a great number of the contemporary, lauded literati that get mention in more mainstream circles – namely that there’s something essential missing. You know all those punitive reading books that end up being discussed to death in high school literature courses, Billy Budd and Moby Dick and all that 18th century stuff? Or even the ancient Greek or Shakespearean equivalents? All that stuff is generally brutally painful to read – the actual language used to convey the plot is the linguistic equivalent of health-food; it makes you feel like you’re doing something good, but you have to force yourself to choke it down. However, once you manage to drill past the surface, the ideas being discussed are the timeless and universal ‘big ideas’ that have been discussed and refined since antiquity without being rendered boring or trite. Rushdie, in contrast, produces a book that you actually voluntarily want to read, having an artistic mastery of the language that Melville could never lay claim to (at least not to 2007 readers, anyway). However, he ends up producing a series of novels which end up as the college apartments of literature: they look good on the walkthrough, with lots of charm and neat features, but a closer inspection reveals a litany of cut corners, shoddy workmanship, and unorthodox use of caulk that speak of a cozy relationship with the local building inspector.

Not to say that the novels are lacking in value; far from it. There are many novels sitting on my bookshelves that I have set aside far more quickly than I have done with any of Sir Rushdie’s work. The majority of his novels are at least partially set in post-colonial India, and his skill in writing about such topics (specifically Bombay/Mumbai) is incredibly vivid; writers who can paint such a believable picture of a place are always going to make an easy connection with me, and his prowess in this area is right up there with Faulkner’s or Joyce’s or that of any of the other masters of the English language. I have never been to Mumbai, but I feel as though I’ve been there as much as I have been to Oxford, or Dublin. No complaints there.

My ambivalence stems almost entirely from his plots. If there is a genre he works in, it would have to be Speculative History with a sub-specialization in Doomed Genealogy. Of the four novels I’ve read, they can pretty much be summed up as portraits of cursed people systematically ruining their lives. Not a bad subgenera to work in; pretty much where the Greek tragedies are coming from, although with perhaps more artistry. The difference, though, is that the world has theoretically evolved a lot past the days of the Greek tragedies. While in the days of yore, people actually believed that the lives of people were being determined by the Fates, the Gods, what have you, these days it seems a little bit like a cop-out to leave all this stuff up the whims of power beyond our control. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, and he’s actually going for a post-classisist statement about such things – how the actual workings of this life are so complex that it might as well be the result of the doings of a dysfunctional divine family for all the fairness and sense that comes out of it.

Regardless of motivation, there’s a definitive trend in his work where he just seems to carefully craft the narrative for about 2/3rd or three quarters of the arc, and then seemingly improvises from the that point to the conclusion. The results are sometimes interesting, sometimes kind of inexplicable. For instance, in a good number of his works, the incidental characters die off like flies in the last third, as though the author couldn’t think of some way to work them into the plot and just decided to write them out of the finale. In Midnight’s Children, the main character’s family, consisting of around 85% of the characters thus introduced, die in a bomb raid during the Pakistan-Indian war, with no real rhyme or reason. That’s actually one of the more believable ones, in a realistic sense if not a literary one. Take The Moor’s Last Sigh, where in the last third, the protagonist’s mother is killed by an assassin, most of the city of Bombay is destroyed in a rash of explosions, and finally the protagonist is imprisoned and more or less killed by his surrogate father. If you haven’t read the book, you might think that I’m simplifying the plot too much by taking out explanatory details. I swear, I really am not; it’s very close to the soap opera saw of the dead fiancee appearing at the wedding, or whatever.

Yet if there’s been any mention of this clunkiness in the professional reviews by people with real literature degrees who aren’t writing on blogs, I haven’t seen them. Even Fury, which charts as really, really, really bad on pretty much every possible scale or categorical axis of badness, has at worst gotten middling reviews. There are so many unbelievable sloppy aspects of the novel that it seems impossibly dated in 2007, 7 years after its publication. Here’s one, no hyperbole inserted: the protagonist, with the help of a gang of street-smart computer thugs, launches a website which contains an interactive story (it’s not specified exactly how this works), which becomes a worldwide success, making a lot of money (somehow) and building an overnight media empire. Another: a crucial plot point revolves around the likely scenario in which the protagonist and his girlfriend are ambushed in bed by three separate characters, all of whom have coincidentally decided to break into his apartment at 3 a.m. on the same night, one after another. Let’s not even mention that the protagonist’s girlfriend is taken directly from his then-girlfriend now-ex-wife Padma Lakshmi, up to and including the scars on her arm (as a sidenote, the male protagonist gets seduced by a woman half his age in every book – classy). Maybe these are all being played for laughs, but it lacks one of the essential qualities of jokedom, i.e. humor. Suffice to say that pretty much everyone dies in Fury, too.

Revisiting the Greek tragedies and whatnot, what makes those plays and poems relevant today is largely that the characters seem like real people. Sure, they may be fighting monsters and having their lives manipulated by gods, but otherwise they behave like people always have. They change, grow, learn the error of their ways, and generally demonstrate a clear psychology despite how long ago they were written. Rushdie’s work, despite being greatly devoted to character studies and plumbing the depths of their thoughts, never achieves that depth in his characters. This is partially due to the death of most of the characters, yes, but it’s also true for the protagonist. Throughout the book, all this stuff happens that should be having some kind of effect on him, but in most cases if there is a turning point it’s not discussed. Meanwhile, characters go crazy and become evil with maybe a paragraph or two of backstory. It’s an exciting world, but one for the most part stops at the skin.

If the truism is right, and we all do have a book or so in us, what’s the point of writing? The world has an endless supply of books, way more than any person could hope to scratch the surface of in a lifetime of reading, let alone working in any new ones. The only need for new books, or new writing in general, then, is to write about the present. The world right now has never existed before, and will never exist again, so anything that is written about it gets an automatic existential pass. The past certainly changes in the context of the present, as the interpretation of history evolves with time. It is telling, though, that Rushdie is a master at capturing places I’ve never been at times before I was born, yet his attempts to represent the here and now seem consistently to border on self-parody. Is modern life so stratified and diverse that any attempt to depict it seems plastic and unrealistic? Or is it that, when you’re writing about history, that history is the star and all you have to use good language to describe it? That strategy doesn’t work with the being-experienced present, or the remembered just-happened; it’s a blank slate, currently too lacking in agreed-upon analysis to have the same official import that historical events do. You can’t just let the present sell itself on glory or nostalgia, so you have to fill it in with ideas. And while there will always be an unquenchable supply of history, and while the people who can bring it to life will always be celebrated, ideas are always much harder to find.

Filed by d at September 15th, 2007 under literature