Gospel & Universe 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt

All the Letters Mixed Up

Rushdie’s exploration of Forster’s huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air begins in 1975 with the publication of his first novel Grimus. Rushdie entered the novel in the Gollancz science-fiction contest. It didn’t win, possibly because it focuses more on other worlds of poetry and myth than on the types of worlds we find in Star Wars or Star Trek. While the novel contains intergalactic journeys and a race of extraterrestrial stone frogs, its setting is a strange fusion of four cosmographies, its journey structure derives mainly from Dantean and Sufi itineraries, and its characters have heavy mythological and mystical associations.

In Grimus, Rushdie conflates four otherworldly schemas, the most important being that of Attar’s Conference of the Birds, a long poem written in the Sufi idiom of twelfth-century Persia. Attar’s flight of 30 birds toward mystical unity and annihilation on Mount Qaf supplies the model for Flapping Eagle’s journey up the Mountain of Calf, which is a false or Golden Calf version of the sacred mountain. Eagle climbs beyond the imperfect Calf to Attar’s Impossible Qaf, a mountain which symbolizes the obliteration of the self and a union of disparate realities. Rushdie conflates Attar’s union and annihilation on Mount Qaf with the following scenarios: Dante and Beatrice’s trajectory from the Mountain of Purgatory to the spheres of Heaven; Shiva and Parvati’s near-cataclysmic intercourse on Mount Kailasa; and the Norse apocalypse of Ragnarok, after which Gimle rises from the sea. The novel contains other such conflations, all of which underscore ideals of iconoclasm, multidimensionality, and the infinite trajectory of the soul. While Grimus is skeptical and Kafkaesque in many ways, it is also intensely idealistic. In this way it isn’t far from Eliot’s modernist fusions in Four Quartets, or from Whitman in Song of Myself when he says to his cosmic spirit,

And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? / And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. (Section 46)

Mysticism and secularism complement one another in Grimus: Rushdie suggests that if dimensions must have controlling Objects, then such Objects generally ought to remain hidden or they'll be subject to selfish manipulation. In the novel, the Rose is such a divine object, which makes sense since the rose is a symbol of love and union in both Christian and Islamic tradition. The rose is a particularly powerful metaphor in Dante (the Blessed Rose brings together the most devoted souls at the end of Paradiso) and in Sufism (where it represents love, the loving soul, and God). As intimated in Virgil’s diary (with a tip of the hat to Nietzsche), the Rose initially appears to be hidden, inactive, or dead — a status symbolized by the dead bird of paradise and by the Rose’s location in the forest next to the cemetery. Virgil brings the Rose from the cemetery into the world and he uses it to fly to the far-off (but mystically near) planet of the dervish-like Spiral Dancers. Later, he uses the esoteric knowledge he finds on that planet to free Eagle from Khallit and Mallit, who represent dichotomous, dogmatic thinking.

Unlike Virgil, Grimus does not have impeccable Classical credentials; his name suggests a grimace and is a negative anagram of Simurg, the bird who is at once thirty birds (si murg in Persian) and who leads Attar’s bird-souls to God (just as Virgil leads Dante through Hell, up the Mountain of Purgatory, and toward God). While Virgil uses the Rose for spiritual flight and liberation, Grimus makes it an instrument of his ego. In so doing, he reduces religion to manipulation, and he turns reality into a game that reduces the lives of others to fictions and to entities that have no free will. Grimus’ detachment from the people he manipulates remains a degradation of Attar’s notion that the universe is irrelevant once one reaches mystical union with God. In Attar, the thirty birds find mystical annihilation after their conference; they don't reconvene in the form of a grimacing authority. Or, as Virgil puts it, “If there were no god, we should have to invent one [and] since there is a Grimus, he must be destroyed” (p. 101).

Grimus prefigures Rushdie characters such as the Widow, Dawood, the Imam, and the Cultmaster, who think that believing in a Higher Truth can translate into controlling others and implementing their own Plan for this world. Such characters are in no way limited to Rushdie’s earlier fiction, as we see in Shalimar’s Talib the Afghan, who would fit in well in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, except of course that he would himself be killed for his beliefs. He tells Shalimar, “God spits on entertainment. I would also order the execution of dentists, professors, sportsmen and whores” (272). In Enchantress we meet “the necromancer of Stamboul, the long-hatted long-bearded Sufi mystic of the Bektashi order, adept in the mesmeric arts and the building of [coercive] memory palaces, working at the behest of a certain newly minted Pasha” (187). We also meet Shah Ismail, who shouts out “I am very God, Very God, Very God!,” and boasts “in the words of the Sufi saint Shaykh Zahid,” “I will break the polo sticks of my adversaries.” As the narrator comments, “Modesty, generosity, kindness: these were not his most renowned characteristics” (213). Rushdie’s point here seems to be that if these are the men speaking in the name of Sufism, then it would be better not to speak of it at all.

Eagle’s refusal to use the Rose in Grimus’ coercive and self-aggrandizing manner suggests that an inter-dimensional God-like power either shouldn’t exist or shouldn’t be accessible to finite beings. Rushdie may be speculating about a universe without a personal God when Eagle asks an assembly of Gorfs (Frogs, anagrammatically) if it's possible to conceptualize a dimension without an Object. Because the Gorfs think structurally, they can't imagine a dimension without an ordering or contextualizing mechanism such as the Rose. Dota (Toad), however, concedes “that he could conceive of a Dimension-dweller devising such a Concept” (251). Having no Object, or having a hidden, unattainable, transcendent Object (a Supra-dimension or transcendent God), suggests the possibility of living in dimensions that aren't liable to being manipulated from above or outside. This seems to be the only God Rushdie can countenance, and this iconoclastic deity may lie behind his numerous parodies of an anthropomorphic God, from the comic phantasm of Aadam’s anger in Midnight's Children to the bumbling myopic “Guy Upstairs” in the Verses.

The infinite dimensionality Rushdie explores in Grimus also crops up fifteen years later in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The hero of the story, Haroun, sees in the currents of the moon Kahani (Hindi for “Story”) “a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity.” He sees “all the stories that had ever been told” as well as those “that were still in the process of being invented.” The Ocean “was in fact the biggest library in the universe” (72). Rushdie borrows this ‘Ocean of the Streams of Story’ from the 11th Century Kashmiri Hindu writer Somadeva; the conflation of the topographies of Somadeva and Attar suggest a positive blend of Hindu and Islamic paradigms. Both Grimus and Haroun posit infinite dimensions or permutations and both depict a scenario in which the protagonist defeats a megalomaniac who tries to impose a specific pattern on what is otherwise a metamorphic, multidimensional “setting.” Eagle takes this victory furthest, for while Haroun and company restore the flow of story-streams into the Ocean, Eagle, as Shiva, becomes Somadeva’s Ocean that contains an infinity of potential stories. 

🇮🇳

Next: When Religions Collide

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs