Is world literature desirable? It was Goethe who first spoke of world literature, but its existence is quite recent; it was born with modernism, and now flourishes darkly in an age of post-modernism. When writers became exiles or ?migr?s, when they began to write in their second or even third languages and, above all, when the experience of this displacement became the subject of their work, then world literature was born, for better or worse. Salman Rushdie is the purest example of this negative liberty-literally homeless, he writes about the actual and figurative centrifuges of modern life. Infamous as a writer to millions who have never read him, Rushdie is ambiguously celebrated by thousands who cannot read him, or who find him unreadable because of the ambitious difficulty of his rare novels, which appear more or less like Five Year Plans. The books are international language-lakes in which swim delightful hybrids and odd schools of syntax. Like the Portuguese novelist Jos? Saramago (who, like Rushdie, has offended one of the monotheisms), WG Sebald and Roberto Calasso, all of whom produce balloons of "world literature," Rushdie's importance lies in his fruitful impatience with conventional narrative, his apparent belief that the novel is not limited by its distinguished genes.
In fact, the Greeks created the first world literature, when they expanded their world into universal myth. Rushdie has championed Roberto Calasso's work on Greek and Indian myth-he has, clearly, read Calasso with greedy care-and his new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, moves smilingly between various mythologies: Greek, Indian and the easier mythology of contemporary celebrity. Rushdie's novel, among much else, is the biography of two rock stars, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama; it tells the story of their love for one another, and their near-deification during the 1970s and 1980s, when, as the founders of a band called VTO, they became the most famous rock 'n' roll act in the world. This tale is told by Umeed Merchant, a photographer who has loved Vina since they were children, and who watches in anguish as Ormus snatches Vina away.
But the novel is also saturated in Greek and Indian myth, and it pays dues to Homer, Virgil and Ovid: the story of Vina and Ormus is in part the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, because Ormus descends to a kind of hell, and loses Vina at the end. And Vina is in part Helen, over whom men start battles, and in part Persephone, lured by her father's brother to the underworld. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a novel of mythology about mythology, which asks us to compare new myths and old ones, and to test each for their groundedness.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a contradictory book: on the one hand, Rushdie's most delightful and vital novel since Midnight's Children; and on the other, something of a characteristic post-modern failure-imprecisely universalising instead of locally exact, cartoonish instead of human, globally pretentious instead of artistically ambitious, fanatically patterned rather than freely self-developing, determinedly allusive rather than naturally dense. These have been the characteristics of all Rushdie's novels since his best, Midnight's Children. The Satanic Verses and The Moor's Last Sigh share with the latest novel a globalising grandiosity; yet his most truly universal novel, Midnight's Children, is his most truly local, his most grounded. The reception of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, particularly in the US, has registered a proper uneasiness about the kind of novel Rushdie now writes. In The New York Review of Books, the novelist and translator-Roberto Calasso's translator, indeed-Tim Parks, was scathing about what he sees as Rushdie's thoughtless anarchism with any world-myth which comes to hand, and scornful about the ultimate prospects of Rushdie's brand of post-modern "hybridity." Parks found the familiar Rushdie exuberance merely clownish and intellectually evasive. (He took particular exception to Rushdie's wild characterisation of Plato, in the novel, as "the ayatollah of love.") Parks's critique has much force. Nevertheless, I am more inclined than Parks to celebrate the novel's vitalism. Rushdie's novel is a student of the ancient myths, but beautifully truant, with its apparently limitless allusions (to the history of pop music, to Anglican hymns, to various literatures, to popular culture and so on), demanding in its spiralling anecdotalism, and idiosyncratically intelligent. Always, the reader is part of the caravan of a true writer's mind, as it travels oddly along. Buoyant, bonhomous, punning, this novel at its best imparts a great creative joy.
Like The Moor's Last Sigh, the new novel is an exiled author's sigh for Bombay, where its story begins, in the 1930s. Umeed Merchant's parents are early property developers of the city; his father, VV Merchant, who delights in word games and artificial languages, is a historian of the city's earliest times. He shares this penchant for intellectual archaeology with Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, a flamboyant barrister and sentimental supporter of the British empire. After the war, Sir Darius labours to cleanse the study of Indo-European myth of its Nazi taint (Rushdie has praised Calasso's writing for the same hygiene). His wife, Lady Spenta Cama, who gives birth to the musical prodigy, Ormus, in May 1937, busies herself with charity work. The two families, Camas and Merchants, become friends, and Ormus Cama and Umeed Merchant grow up in wary proximity.
Into both Ormus's and Umeed's lives comes the beautiful Vina Apsara, half-Indian, half-Greek, who was born in the US but who moved, in difficult circumstances in the 1950s, to India. Ormus and Vina love each other immediately, although in their relationship they will endure years of separation. Umeed watches as Ormus goes to London in the mid-1960s (Rushdie provides a very funny satire of swinging London), and begins to make a name for himself as a singer-songwriter. During the 1970s, based in New York, Ormus and Vina become hugely famous, contemporary gods. After Vina's death in 1989-perhaps especially after her death-the cult of VTO thrives.
But Ormus and Vina are pulled from below by the unearthly force of the underworld. Neither really has ground beneath his or her feet. Both Ormus and Vina are haunted, as is Umeed, by family disasters-parental suicides, murders and lies. In Homeric fashion, all three are followed and finally ruined by their battling, selfish, quasi-divine parents. Indeed, Rushdie's novel is at its most naturally moving and artistic when elaborating Vico's idea that the ancient myths represent the world's childhood, its family album. Rushdie personalises and inverts Vico's idea, turning the childhoods of Vina, Ormus and Umeed into mythology, and presenting the parents of these three as godly, larger-than-life characters.
In so doing, Rushdie, who has learned much from Bulgakov and Russian formalism, makes explicit what is merely implicit in most novels: that a writer's childhood, refracted through his characters' childhoods, is godly. As Umeed charmingly explains, "for many Indians, our parents are as gods." VV Merchant and the ridiculous Sir Darius Xerxes Cama are false gods, but they still imprint themselves religiously on their children. And behind Umeed, we feel the autobiographical pangs of Rushdie himself, who cannot easily return to Bombay, his childhood city. When you have been exiled from the Alhambra of your youth, as both Umeed and Rushdie have been, the sepia-glow of childhood myth is severe indeed.
It is difficult to summarise this bounding novel, which moves between Bombay, London and New York, which connects Plato and earthquakes, rock music and mysticism, and also manages to present an alternative history of the last 40 years, in which Oswald's gun only jammed, and Pierre Menard actually wrote Don Quixote. There is a danger, in all this, that the reader simply credits the existence of pattern-which is how Thomas Pynchon is too often, too generously read. This is certainly a ferociously self-conscious novel, so that when we encounter this sentence about Ormus hearing some music-"The music is a great bird calling out to the bird of the same species that lies hidden in his own throat, in the egg of his Adam's apple, hatching, nearing its time"-we may notice that it is somewhat forced as a sentence in its rush to allude to the Greek myth that Helen (namely, Vina) was born from an egg, Zeus having visited Leda in the form of a swan. Perhaps Rushdie does indeed mean for us to find that reference; there are hundreds like it in the book. But pattern is both the premise of any work of art, and the easiest embroidery; to make the figure in the carpet a figure is the novelist's animistic task.
And Rushdie, to be fair, often does achieve life, not in his cartoonish and allegorical characters, but in his language, which is tumultuously alive. Rushdie simply awards it to all of his characters, so that they begin to share, even in their cartoonishness, some of the vitalism of their author. All Rushdie's characters are word-gamesters and punners; they have been so since Midnight's Children. This can create an oppressive sense of a novel without any internal borders, all of the histrionic characters, plus the author, making the same mummers' music. But more often it is delightful. Umeed, is, at times, an angry photographer, "a choleric snappeur" who resents playing second fiddle to the brilliant spectacle (and final demise) of Ormus and Vina: "second-fiddling while Rome burns." Umeed tells us that when he was growing up in Bombay, in the 1930s, he assumed that the art deco style of many of the buildings was unique to the city, an "art dekho" ("dekho" being the imperative of the verb "to see" in Hindi). Elsewhere in the novel, Bombay, the mother-city, becomes "Wombay," and Ormus's mother, Lady Spenta, goes off to have "chariteas" with a friend-morning teas at which the ladies plan their charity work. To this can be added "General Waste-More-Land," a group of thuggish Sikh bodyguards known as "Sikh jokes," Ormus's love of English bread, or "bread of leaven," Umeed's term for Vina and Ormus, the "two scoops de th?atre." There is also a man called Waldo Emerson Crossley, not named after Emerson, but after waldorf salad, "as eaten by his presently divorced parents on the night he was conceived."
This is the Joycean side of Rushdie-the Joyce who made genteel English Tennyson into "Alfred Lawn Tennyson"-and some readers may find it too farcical, or simply inconsequential. But the pun is central to Rushdie's metamorphic and metaphorical vision, where words and objects are continually discovering their unwanted political ghosts. (What is metaphor but visual punning at a high level?) The pun is subversive, as Shakespeare's fools know, because it reminds power that it rests on the instabilities of language, and language is unstable in part because it is so continuously, so democratically used, like the Vauxhall gardens. Joyce joked that the catholic church was founded on a pun (Peter/petrus), thus implying that the rock of ages was just the mineral of a few letters. Punning is the engine of this book, encouraging both writer and reader to make impertinent connections between different objects and between old and new stories, and which above all licenses the novel's strong vein of anarchic fantasy.
Rushdie is almost always at his strongest as a novelist when he is most satirical; and at his weakest when sentimentally earnest, didactic or merely conventional. Punning leads his talents in the right direction, towards a kind of Swiftian ingenuousness, in which the author always seems a little surprised by his own peculiar metamorphoses. But the novel cannot exist on punning alone, and in several respects Rushdie's novel represents a characteristic post-modern defeat. First, Rushdie needs Umeed to tell us again and again that Vina and Ormus are like Greek and Indian heroes. Not only is the quantity of explicit reference wearying, but it works against the novelistic, crushing the human from Vina and Ormus-they do indeed become mythical figures. Modernism could be more confident, or more elitist, about such matters. Joyce's characters do not know that they are Homeric, and the reader is not directly informed about their pre-history. Thus they remain human. Allusion, in a work like Ulysses, is certainly wilful, but it leaks out gradually, like the resin of something alive; it is private, intermittent, and mangled, as it is in real life.
Allusion is elusive in Joyce, but only allusive in Rushdie. For in post-modern writing-perhaps we should now call it high post-modernism-such as Pynchon's, Rushdie's and Grass's, allusion is alluded to: what we are supposed to register is, above all, the existence of the allusive.
It is difficult for human beings to exist inside this kind of web; indeed, Rushdie does not attempt to make his characters human in the traditional realistic sense. The vitalism, as I suggested, is transferred from Rushdie's language and joyfully imposed on his characters. This is an acceptable form of bullying, until Rushdie uses his narrator to remind his characters that they do not know enough, that they, in effect, do not belong in the book-the inevitable danger of such writerly imposition. At one point, Rushdie writes of Umeed's mother that "her word games said more than she knew." This is because Umeed's mother has "discovered" that Ormus Cama's name may yield all kinds of buried meanings: she nicknames him Ormie da Cama, after Vasco da Gama, the explorer, "and it was a short step from Gama to Gana, song, and between Cama and Kama, the god of love, the distance was even less. Ormus Kama, Ormus Gana. The embodiment of love, and also of song itself."
Well, this is the price the reader pays for the controlling presence of the author, who has decided in advance that "her word games said more than she knew." We accept it because the author tells us to, and we turn away from the characters, who could not possibly have conceived these puns, towards the author, who did, and who promises to give us more of such wild fun and games. We develop a kind of learned dependency, and become, in effect, characters of the author, shaped and led by his intricacies. But this jokey, cartoonish control of both characters and readers seems to me a limited, lesser mode of novel-writing, a considerable way from the highest possibilities and freedoms of the novel as a form-display rather than drama, a spectacle rather than a picture, an imprisonment rather than a liberation. And one is not surprised when, near the end of the book, the narrator says of Vina's father: "Doorman Shetty doesn't know it, but he's echoing Plato," and then continues, "This is what the great philosopher has Phaedrus say in the Symposium's first speech about love." At such moments, an author always seems to be scourging his characters-as Matthew Arnold scourged the early Romantic poets-because they do not know enough. We may compare, by contrast, a beautifully comic and moving moment in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, when Einhorn, writing his own father's obituary for a local newspaper, makes foolish, heartbreaking reference to Plato, in an attempt to sound impressive. Bellow sees this with wide comic sympathy, and does not need to tell us what Einhorn does not know about Plato. Thus Einhorn is a character full of pathos, while Doorman Shetty is merely Rushdie's pawn, full of programmatic ignorance.
Such gestures, of course, not only limit the novelistic, they actually abolish it, because the novel exists precisely to act as the most beautiful absorptive evasion of this kind of discursive writing. Moreover, at least when Rushdie communicates to us through the great vitality of his language, he communicates not as Salman Rushdie-the-man but as a literary persona (no reader really imagines that Rushdie speaks in real life as he writes, or as his characters speak). But the interpolation of passages of erudition leads us uncomfortably away from the novelistic creation that is Rushdie-the-author to the much feebler man called Salman Rushdie, balancing his dog-eared copy of the Symposium on his knees somewhere in London or Long Island, dauntlessly tapping chunks of it into his word-processor. Post-modernism, it seems, knows only this strange, clumsy way of beefing itself up intellectually. Like a man who takes so many classes that he has no time to read, post-modernism's very ambition, at such moments, threatens the novel.
And so Rushdie's novel, for all its many delights, suggests at times an important difference between modernism and post-modernism. Joyce's experimentalism, in particular his stream-of-consciousness, was the very culmination of novelistic realism-the realism which took the human to be its object. The stream-of-consciousness is the stutter of the soul, the novel's noble and finally doomed attempt to represent publicly our intolerable privacies. The tradition from which Rushdie gains most inspiration, although it might seem to be the modernistic, is in fact the 18th-century novel, with its buoyant, cheerfully external, picaresque profusions.
Rushdie's variety of post-modern novel, again following Russian formalism (which chose Tristram Shandy as the most characteristic of all novels), sees novels as labyrinths of stories rather than as corridors of consciousness. But when this belief is programmatic, as it is nowadays, rather than instinctive, as it was with Sterne, then characters may become victims of a writer's many narratives rather than tellers of their own tales.
