Up in the Air
If you want to read about the atheist bus campaign that Jim referred to in class, you can read, among others, this BBC article. Well, shall I call upon you to find a passage in The Satanic Verses that speaks to you in some way (preferably in terms of the critical contexts and discussions surrounding the class) and share with us a modest observational, critical close-reading of your chosen passage here on the blog? At some point, too, we should probably find occasion to point out and discuss the verbal/linguistic felicities of Rushdie's prose.
I don't want to belabor this, but I simply love the way Rushdie uses the metaphor of floating debris in the opening scene, and the way that debris is composed of both material and immaterial things (e.g., "remnants of the plane" and "debris of the soul"; "drinks trolleys" and notions like land, belonging, and home). In a course that's so much about things being "up in the air" (identity possibilities, power dynamics, historical truth, personal histories, etc.), this scene is devastatingly appropriate. I recall, too, that great section in the first chapter of The Global Soul in which Iyer describes that "High above the clouds, in an alternative plane of existence--a duty-free zone, in a way, in which everyone around him was a stranger--the Global Soul would be facing not just new answers to the old questions but a whole new set of questions, as he lived through shifts that the traditional passenger on ocean liner or long-distance train could never have imagined. " New questions that need answers. It's no surprise when, a few pages after the crash of the airliner, Rushdie's narrator poses the central question of the book: "How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is?" (8).
The Iyer connections in The Satanic Verses continue in a passage like that one on page 41, when Chamcha considers the distance between Bombay and London, between Indianness and Londonness. In one sense it's "five and a half thousand as the crow," but in another sense it's "not very far at all." This novel will be about movements between these two cities, and everything that movement implies for identity. It sounds very Joycean, too, to think of identities being unmoored and recombined in cities, to think that one of the prime effects of cities is to bring stories and narratives together (we'll see this idea rendered in a quite devastating way in McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street later in the semester).
I don't want to belabor this, but I simply love the way Rushdie uses the metaphor of floating debris in the opening scene, and the way that debris is composed of both material and immaterial things (e.g., "remnants of the plane" and "debris of the soul"; "drinks trolleys" and notions like land, belonging, and home). In a course that's so much about things being "up in the air" (identity possibilities, power dynamics, historical truth, personal histories, etc.), this scene is devastatingly appropriate. I recall, too, that great section in the first chapter of The Global Soul in which Iyer describes that "High above the clouds, in an alternative plane of existence--a duty-free zone, in a way, in which everyone around him was a stranger--the Global Soul would be facing not just new answers to the old questions but a whole new set of questions, as he lived through shifts that the traditional passenger on ocean liner or long-distance train could never have imagined. " New questions that need answers. It's no surprise when, a few pages after the crash of the airliner, Rushdie's narrator poses the central question of the book: "How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is?" (8).
The Iyer connections in The Satanic Verses continue in a passage like that one on page 41, when Chamcha considers the distance between Bombay and London, between Indianness and Londonness. In one sense it's "five and a half thousand as the crow," but in another sense it's "not very far at all." This novel will be about movements between these two cities, and everything that movement implies for identity. It sounds very Joycean, too, to think of identities being unmoored and recombined in cities, to think that one of the prime effects of cities is to bring stories and narratives together (we'll see this idea rendered in a quite devastating way in McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street later in the semester).
posted by Eric at 3:10 PM
3 Comments:
I missed class last time, so I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but:
So far, more than any other chapter, the one entitled "Mahound" has really spoken to me, especially the lengthy passage about the city made of sand and the way water is treated within it.
I took a class on Arabic thought last year (in which, naturally, we talked a lot about Islam), and in that context, when people talked about Jahilia, they were usually talking about a time- the time before Islam, used with similar connotations to those the word "pagan" used to have in Christian contexts before Wicca etc. reappropriated it. (Ignorance, savagery, amorality, etc.) To call something a "return to Jahilia" would be (as I understand it) to say that it goes against the principles of Islam (sometimes the rigid rules, sometimes general principles like equality of all believers, monotheism, etc.)
So, in that context (which I certainly only partially understand, considering that I only had a semester on it), I can't stop thinking about the sand and water metaphor. It seems to equate (at least in the minds of certain fundamentalist characters) the kind of compromise that the ruler of Jahilia embodies with the kind of anarchy that the word "Jahilia" conjures up. It's a neat bit of psychology- compromise, in itself, doesn't seem like a concept that would be worth battling, but to certain figures (the hijackers, the London cops, Mahound & Co.), it's a very frightening thing, and Rushdie sort of gets us into their heads enough to see why.
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Speaking of the metaphors of flying, floating, and falling, the Imam episode in "Ayesha" continues to exploit this figurative language in the description of the Imam's exile: "The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time... denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which... the earth reclaim its own" (212). There is a fundamental difference here between Rushdie's conceptions of homeland for immigrants and exiles; the immigrant protagonists embrace one another in a fall while the exile remains suspended above his only option: return.
The "tossed ball" image recalls earlier musings on flying, as Chamcha "rose from one great city, fell to another" (41); as Eric points out, this is characteristic of Pico Iyer's globalized individual. In contrasted to Chamcha's cosmopolitanism, the Imam's intense focus on his homeland and his revolutionary return-- he keeps only postcards of his homeland, a stark contrast to Lifafa Das' postcards in Midnight's Children-- remains his only sense of home. Indeed, "in exile all attempts to put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat" (215). Clearly Chamcha's narrative inverts this logic; for him to set down roots in London victoriously, however, he must at least acknowledge his relationship with London's immigrant communities that the Imam similarly rejects.
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