April 18, 1999
The Orpheus of MTV
Salman Rushdie's new novel sets the familiar myth in the glittering world of rock-and-roll celebrities.
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Rushdie Unplugged: An Interview With Charles McGrath
Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' (April 13, 1999)
By MICHAEL WOOD
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THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
By Salman Rushdie.
575 pp. New York:
Henry Holt & Company. $27.50.
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here are two countries,'' Salman Rushdie wrote in his 1983 novel, ''Shame.'' ''Real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality.'' Rushdie's angle to reality, as we all know, altered violently after he wrote those words, but even earlier, in ''Midnight's Children,'' where the narrator is born at the exact moment of the historical partition of India, there were already slippages. In the novel Gandhi is assassinated on the wrong day, and the narrator can't rewrite or repent: ''In my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.''
Much wonderful fiction runs parallel to reality, if we take reality (for the moment) to mean the material world inhabited by live human beings, and some fiction simply usurps reality's space. But there are writers who specialize in the angled relation: Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Garcia Mrquez, Rushdie himself. There is a speculative or satirical edge to their divergences; the country at an angle is a quizzical commentary on our own. History disappears into fantasy only to reappear as a haunting or a reproof. In ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet,'' his exuberant and elegiac new novel -- and to my mind his best since ''Midnight's Children'' -- Rushdie takes this movement about as far as it can go. Just as in Nabokov's ''Ada'' the insane inhabitants of the fictional world have glimpses of what we take to be the real world, certain characters in Rushdie's work peer out into our space and see what we take to be the facts. A young man in the novel's India is able, by a kind of scrambled and temporally troubled communication with our world, to sing hit songs of the 50's and 60's before they are released in the West: ''Yesterday,'' ''Blowin' in the Wind,'' ''I Got You, Babe,'' ''Like a Rolling Stone.'' By the same means he seems to see that John Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, that there is an American President called Richard Nixon, that British troops are not involved in Vietnam. Carly Simon is not the same person as Paul Simon, and John Lennon is not Mick Jagger. Within the world of the novel, though, these are not facts but weird alternative realities, crazed visions.
Facts inside the fiction include John Kennedy's narrow escape in Dallas, the double assassination of John and Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles by a single ricocheting bullet, a novel called ''Catch-18,'' another called ''The Watergate Affair'' and the literal re-enactment of the plots of several famous movies, like Bunuel's ''Exterminating Angel,'' Godard's ''Breathless'' and Truffaut's ''Jules and Jim.'' When this kind of disturbance starts -- I began to pay attention to it with the appearance of a singer called Placido Lanza and a film called ''Treat Me Tender'' -- it seems like a mild allusive joke of the kind often slipped into realistic fiction, particularly in the matter of naming. When I got to a famous photographer, a ''tall, sloping Frenchman in his 60's'' called Mr. H., I was still looking for a historical connection, but was delighted to discover this personage was none other than Jacques Tati's Monsieur Henri Hulot, certainly one of the most famous photographers of all time, even if he is fictional.
Nick Vaccaro/ Henry Holt and Company |
Salman Rushdie
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What Rushdie is doing goes well beyond joke and whimsy. The world of this novel -- several countries, East and West -- exists at a wide angle to reality but also makes us wonder what would happen if the angle closed. Rushdie is demonstrating not the fictionality of fiction (or of reality) but the difficulty of telling where fiction begins and ends. In his short-story collection, ''East, West,'' he writes ironically of those who oppose ''the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality,'' but the irony is more complicated than it looks. We need those imaginary beings, and one of the saddest moments in ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet'' occurs when the young Indian, now older, loses his access to his alternative world because that world itself has died. But we need to look to our damaged reality too.
''In the old stories,'' Rushdie's narrator writes in ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet,'' ''the point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire. They vacate the stage and leave us alone upon it, stumbling over our lines.'' The stumbling actor here is one Umeed Merchant, a k a Rai, a successful Indian photographer who has long left India behind, but can't stop saying goodbye. Disorientation, he repeatedly remarks, is loss of the East. Westerners can lose it too, just as ''a kind of India happens everywhere,'' in Rai's phrase. But all local losses are different, and India itself happens only in India.
The global loss is that of firm ground, and the novel shivers with accelerating earthquakes, which Rai takes as evidence of a ''wider fracturing,'' an endless moral and political upheaval. ''We live on a broken mirror,'' he says, ''and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.'' There are ''places where the fabric of the earth has put itself in question.'' Later he says, ''We can't trust our damaged earth.'' Rushdie plays inventively with the idiom of his title, but mostly leaves the full working out of its implications to us. We worship the ground beneath a person's feet. Not a good idea, perhaps, if the ground is cracking. And shouldn't we be worshiping the person, if we have to worship at all?
Rai is not religious, and his compulsive and guilty memories amount only to a backhanded worship. His human story concerns the lives of the rock singer Vina Apsara, whose death (in an earthquake) is announced on the first page and flickers in one form or another almost everywhere in the book, and her husband and lover and musical partner, the rock composer, singer and musician Ormus Cama. They are pretty good separately, but together they are ''magical'': ''more Righteous than the Righteous Brothers,'' as Rai effusively says, ''Everlier than the Everlys, Supremer than the Supremes.'' They were Rai's gods; their love was, he says, ''as close as I've come to a knowledge of the mythic, the overweening, the divine.'' ''This is a story,'' Rai insists, ''of deep but unstable love, one of breakages and reunions; a love of endless overcoming, defined by the obstacles it must surmount.'' Because in another sense, as we learn very early on, the lovers were not gods at all but mere mortals working out their oddly intimate relation with the kingdom of death. The novel is full of music, of described sounds and snatches of lyrics, but it is also full of murder and self-slaughter. Vina's mother murders her children and her husband, leaving only her singing daughter alive; Ormus's brother murders his parents, along with a number of other people. The singers' agent is killed, their producer kills himself; Rai's parents both commit suicide. It's not only that the dead walk in this novel, as they certainly do. The living keep walking into the company of the dead.
FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
"There is very little that Salman Rushdie can do himself. The task is for the rest of us to resist the notion that beheadings and ritual destruction of toys are rational and humane, and that a religious leader in one country has the power to condemn a citizen of another country to death for writing a book." -- Paul Theroux, from an essay, (February 13, 1992)
Featured Author: Salman Rushdie |
The epigraph from Rilke tells us from the start (''We should not trouble / about other names. Once and for all / it's Orpheus when there's singing'') that we should look out for the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but there is also its inversion, embodied in the Indian myth of Kama and Rati, the love god and his wife, in which ''it was the woman who interceded with the deity and brought Love -- Love itself! -- back from the dead.'' In the novel a figure recalling Eurydice or Rati twice gets Ormus to come back to life, but then the original Western story still holds as well. In the end, or just before the end, when the stumbling actors come on, Orpheus fails once again to lead Eurydice out of the underworld. What is happening here? Rai unfolds the possibilities. Does Orpheus' failure prove that love dies? That music cannot vanquish death? That Orpheus didn't love Eurydice enough to join her in death but had to try to get her out? That the gods have hard hearts? And who was Eurydice? Was she perhaps, as Rai also asks, a child of death herself, merely going home and seeking to take Orpheus with her?
Rai is also in love with Vina, of course, and with her memory, and is trying to come to terms with the fact that he is just the third person who is always a crowd -- Orpheus and Eurydice and who? He is a garrulous fellow, a little preachy at times (''love is what we want, not freedom'') but also very funny, never short of a multicultural allusion or a terrible pun. Ormus's male relatives are said to be, ''all of them in their various ways, a couple of annas short of the full rupee.'' Vincent Price is a ''smooth nocturnal prince of the fanged classes''; a girl totes a small gun that is called a Giuliani & Koch 9-millimeter. ''East is East,'' Rai remarks on the subject of Ormus's liking for English bread, ''ah, but yeast is West.'' Above all Rai allows Rushdie, through the mind and style of the guilty, observant, intelligent photographer (''photography is my way of understanding the world''), to remain brilliantly lighthearted, in spite of his own position in the world we share with him, and in spite of all the yearning and terror and mourning that have gone into this book. The world of music, Rai says, is a ''world of ruined selves,'' and Vina and Ormus, both damaged, ''are both repairers of damage.'' I'm not sure how much repairing Vina and Ormus really do, and the many samples of Ormus's lyrics are not encouraging. (''Everything you thought you knew: it's not true. And everything you knew you said, was all in your head.'') But then he is only an imaginary musician, and Rushdie is a real writer, and in this book he not only repairs much damage done to both fiction and the world, he finds, as he says Vina does, ''a direct line to the world's ashamed unconfident heart,'' and makes us laugh with the sheer proliferating energy of his call.
Michael Wood teaches English at Princeton. His most recent book is ''Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction.''
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