Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (141 page)

The story of Macondo has a mythic quality, with countless allusions to twentieth-century ideas. Márquez deliberately gives his story a dated feel, so the reader is distanced from the action, as Bertolt Brecht recommended. It is likewise an attempt to re-enchant the world: things happen in Macondo that could happen nowhere else. This is not exactly biblical but close; we may not believe what happens, but we accept it. The illusions evoke Kafka, but a very sunny Kafka. In some senses José Buendía and his wife Ursula are the primordial couple, who undertake an exodus from the jungle in search of the sea; the ages of some characters are vastly inflated, as in the early books of the Bible; Melquíades presents the family with a manuscript written in Sanskrit code: this recalls both the decipherment of languages of earlier civilisations and the observations of Sir William Jones, the British judge in India, about the ‘mother tongue.’ The parchment on which the code is written turns out also to be a mirror, throwing us back on the relation between the text and reader and the ideas of Jacques Derrida. The playing with time recalls not only relativity but Fernand Braudel’s ideas of
la longue durée
and what governs it. Underneath all, as Carlos Fuentes has pointed out,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
questions: ‘What does Macondo know about its creation?’ In other words, the very question that has so obsessed twentieth-century science.
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In the way that Macondo ends, Márquez even raises the idea of entropy. In the very last sentence, he reminds us that we have no second opportunity in life, and this is the ‘big reason’ why the ‘official version’ of things should never be ‘put up with.’ The book may well be the greatest achievement of its kind in the last half of the twentieth century.

The wider significance of these alternative worlds is twofold. They are metaphors for Latin America itself, as a site for ‘the other,’ a key concept, as it turned out, in postmodernism. Second, and arguably more important, is their ‘playful maturity’; these are artists who have distanced themselves from the
quotidian and the political. In so doing, they have given an undoubted stature to Latin American fiction with which the mother country, Spain, cannot compete. As Márquez makes explicit, Latin American fiction at base is about solitude, the continent itself used as a metaphor for that predicament.

After the magic realism of Latin America, the fabulous intricacies of Indian fiction probably come next in any fledgling ‘canon.’ Twentieth-century Indian novels written in English date from the 1930s at least, with the works of Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand, but the novels published since, say, R. K. Narayan’s ‘Malgudi’ stories fall into two kinds: minute observations and commentaries on Indian life, and attempts to find some sort of escape from it. The familiar idioms of English being used in such fabulous settings certainly highlight that the language no longer belongs to anyone.

R. K. Narayan’s many novels generally take place in his beloved Malgudi, otherwise known as Mysore.
The Sweet Vendor,
published in 1967, is a study of spirituality, though not as, say, a Christian would understand it.
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For sixty years, Jagan has sold sweets from his store, when suddenly he decides to change his life: he is going to help a stonemason carve a ‘pure image’ of a goddess so that others can find spirituality in her contemplation. But of course he takes his foibles (and his checkbook) with him, with some hilarious consequences. The fact is, Jagan’s change in life is ambitious – too ambitious for his flawed personality: like someone in a Larkin poem, he is not really up to the challenge he has set himself. It is not that easy to retreat from life; for one thing, there is his moody son, more Westernised than he, with an American-Korean wife (actually a mistress), and with whom Jagan is constantly at odds. Narayan is of course poking serious fun at India herself, her spirituality (or spiritual pretensions), her ambition to be a world power when she cannot even feed herself (Jagan produces ‘frivolous’ food), and is both contemptuous and envious of the West.

Anita Desai’s novels are in general domestic stories, small-scale on the face of it, but in each one the characters are unprepared for the life of an independent India, which as often as not involves some measure of Westernisation. In
The Village by the Sea,
the locals of Thul are worried by the government’s proposal to install a chemical fertiliser plant nearby.
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Hari, the main character, unlike many other villagers who don’t want change, seeks to adjust to the new state of affairs by escaping to Bombay and becoming a watch repairer, in anticipation of all the watch wearers who will come and live in the village. Others ensure that the village remains a bird sanctuary, but once Hari’s life – his ambitions – had been disturbed, and despite his dismal experiences in Bombay, there is no going back. The new silence isn’t the same as the old one. Desai is saying that change is a question less of events than of attitude, psychology. Deven, the main character of
In Custody,
has great ambition, and when he is invited to become the secretary of the great Urdu poet Nur, he conceives a grand plan to tape-record the poet’s wisdom.
²³
In fact, this plan runs into endless difficulties; the poet himself is much less than perfect – he loves pigeons, wrestling, and whores just as much as wisdom – but Deven’s technological incompetence is also a
factor, so that the whole project descends into chaos. Desai’s stories are small tragedies, though large enough for the characters who live through them. Is this India as she always was, or as she has been made by colonial occupation? In Desai’s stories no one seems to know.

Not so in the stories of Salman Rushdie. There is nothing small about either his characters or his plots. His two best-known books,
Midnight’s Children,
1981, and
The Satanic Verses,
1988, are written in an exuberant, overflowing style, the images and metaphors and jokes billowing forth like the mushroom clouds of an atomic bomb.
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Rushdie’s relationship to his native India, and to the English language, is complex. His stories tell us that there are many Indias, enough of them grim, failing, divided. English at least offers the chance of overcoming the chronic divisions, without which failure cannot be conquered, and only by embarking on a fabulous journey of improbable fantasies can he hope to have what are in fact very direct messages swallowed.
Midnight’s Children
tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on the day India achieved independence in 1947, one of 1,001 other children to be born at the same time. By virtue of this, all of them are given some magical property, and the closer their birth to midnight, when ‘the clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting,’ the stronger their magical power. Saleem has a very large nose, which grants him the ability to see ‘into the hearts and minds of men.’ His chief rival, Shiva, has bloated knees, meaning he has the power of war. The book is written mainly in the form of Saleem’s memoirs, but there is little in the way of traditional characterisation. Instead Rushdie gives us a teeming, tumbling narrative, juxtaposing day-to-day politics and private obsessions (one figure works on a documentary about life in a pickle factory), all intertwined with ever more fabulous metaphors and jokes and language constructions. The best and most terrible joke comes in the central scene where the two main characters discover that they have been swapped as babies. Rushdie is challenging the meaning of the most basic ideas – innocence, enchantment, nation, self, community. And, in so doing, independence. All this is done with an ‘elephantiasis’ of style that emulates the Indian oral storytellers of old, yet is as modern as it is reminiscent of Günther Grass and Gabriel García Márquez.
Midnight’s Children
is neither eastern nor western. That is the point, and the measure of its success.
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The theme of
The Satanic Verses
is migration, emigration, and the loss of faith it often brings about in the emigrant/immigrant.
²⁶
Faith, its loss, and the relation of faith to the secular life, the hole – the ‘God-shaped hole’ – at the centre of the once-faithful person, is the issue that, Rushdie has admitted, underpins the book.
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He deals with the issue also in a fabulous way. The book begins when two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, formerly Salahuddin Chamchawal, fall to earth after an Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel. This naturally evokes the memory of an actual explosion, of an Air India Boeing 747 off Ireland in 1985, blown up, it is believed, by Sikh terrorists in Canada.
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Farishta is the star of several Bombay ‘theological’ films and is so popular that for many an Indian he
is
divine. Saladin, on the other hand, is an Anglophile who has rejected India and lives in Britain doing voiceovers for television commercials, ‘impersonating
packets of crisps, frozen peas, Ketchup bottles.’
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These two fall to earth in the company of airplane seats, drink carts, headsets, but land safely enough on a British beach. From then on, the book follows a series of interwoven plots, each more fantastic than the last. These episodes are never out of control, however, and Rushdie’s references make the book very rich for those who can decipher them. For example, Gibreel Farishta, in Urdu, means Gabriel Angel, making him in effect the archangel whom Islamic tradition regards as ‘“bringing down” the Qur’an from God to Muhammad.’ Saladin was also the great defender of mediaeval Islam against the Crusaders, who restored Sunni Islam to Egypt. Gibreel, learning Islam from his mother, encounters the notion of the Satanic Verses, in which the devil is understood to have inserted a sentence in the Qur’an, later withdrawn, but which nonetheless insinuates a sliver of religious doubt. Religious doubt, then, is at the very heart of Rushdie’s book. One may even say that it plays with the very idea of the devil, of the secular
being
the devil, certainly so far as the faithful are concerned. Essentially, throughout the interlocking narratives, Saladin is a sort of Iago to Gibreel’s Othello, ‘using the thousand and one voices of his advertising days.’ Under this onslaught, Gibreel is led astray, notably to a brothel, the ‘anti-Mosque’ in Malise Ruthven’s apt phrase, falling among people who blaspheme, not just in swear-words but in their criticisms of the Prophet’s actual behaviour (for example, Muhammad had more wives than strict Islamic law allowed). At every opportunity, therefore,
The Satanic Verses
skirts danger. It is certainly a challenging book. But can a book that explores blasphemy actually pursue that theme without
being
blasphemous? In exploring faith, Rushdie knew he had to deliberately provoke the faithful. At one point in the book, the Prophet issues a
fatwa
against an impious poet.
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Perhaps it was this above all which provoked the Islamic authorities. On 14 February 1989, Ruhollah Al-Musavi Al-Khomeini – better known as Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran – issued a
fatwa
against the ‘apostasian’ book
Satanic Verses:
‘In the name of God Almighty; there is only one God, to whom we shall all return; I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled
The Satanic Verses
which has been compiled, printed and published against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing. In addition, anyone who has access to the author of the book, but does not possess the power to execute him, should refer him to the people so that he may be punished for his actions. May God’s blessing be on you all.’
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Inside forty-eight hours, Rushdie and his wife had gone into hiding, where he would remain except for brief forays into the limelight, for nearly ten years. In subsequent months, the ‘Rushdie affair’ claimed many headlines. Muslims in Britain and elsewhere staged public burnings of the tide; ten thousand demonstrated against the book in Iran, and in Rushdie’s native Bombay ten people were killed when police opened fire on demonstrators.
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In all, twenty-one
people died over
The Satanic Verses,
nineteen on the Indian subcontinent, two in Belgium.
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Like Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul’s novels – his later novels especially – generally concern people living outside their native context. He himself was born in Trinidad, a second-generation Indian, moved to England to attend Oxford, and has remained there ever since, except to research a remarkable series of travel books.

Naipaul is less concerned with faith than Rushdie, and has more in common with Anita Desai’s fascination with modernisation and technological change, though he uses this to reflect his preoccupation with the nature of freedom. A
House for Mr. Biswas
(1961) ostensibly follows the building of a house. At the same time Naipaul deconstructs Mr. Biswas himself.
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His facility for sign writing leads him out of the prison of poverty and into a marriage where he is trapped, but in a different way. Sign writing leads to other forms of writing, letters to his son mainly. As he discovers language, like a writer discovers language, so Biswas discovers another layer of freedom. But total freedom, Naipaul infers, is not only impossible but undesirable. Fulfilment comes from loving and being loved, a status Biswas achieves, but it is not freedom. In
The Mimic Men
(1968), the scene has shifted to England, not the dream England that a poor Trinidadian might conceive of but the drab, suburban England of the immigrant, with the endless fresh attempts to get going on a career, the chronic tiredness, and the poor sense of self that comprise modern city life.
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Again, freedom boils down to one struggle replacing another. The later books –
In a Free State
(1971), which won the Booker Prize,
Guerrillas
(1975), and
A Bend in the River
(1979) – are more nakedly political, juxtaposing political and private freedom in deliberately jarring ways.
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In the 1971 book, two white people, Linda and Bobby, drive back to their expats’ compound through a black African state laid low by civil war. Their politics differ – Bobby is a liberal homosexual, Linda a bombastic right-winger. Naipaul is asking how they can enjoy so many freedoms at home when they can’t agree on anything. In the car, there is civil war between them.