The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity. . . .
--AnaximanderMyths do not die; they sleep. When they awaken, they travel, passing from one epoch to another, crossing oceans and continents, taking their abode in the most secret thoughts of humankind.
--Pietro Citati [1]
Scene after blue scene passed before her eyes. There were tumultuous marketplaces and crenellated fortress-palaces and fields under cultivation and thieves in jail, there were high, toothy mountains and great fish in the sea. Pleasure gardens were laid out in blue, and blue-bloody battles were grimly fought; blue horsemen pranced beneath lamplit windows and blue-masked ladies swooned in arbours. O, and intrigue of courtiers and dreams of peasant and pigtailed tallymen at their abacuses and poets in their cups. . . . in Flory Zogoiby's mind's eye, marched the ceramic encyclopaedia of the material world that was also a bestiary, a travelogue, a synthesis and a song, and for the first time in all her years of caretaking Flory saw what was missing from the hyperabundant cavalcade. (84)For the devout Flory, an unexpected conclusion hits with force: "There is no world but the world," she murmurs. "There is no spiritual life," she whispers shockingly.
All myths presuppose a previous narrative, and in true form the model of future narratives. Strictly speaking, the pattern of promise and fulfillment need never end; no sooner has one narrative promise been fulfilled than the fulfillment becomes in turn the promise of further myth-making. Thus myths remake other myths, and there is no reason why they should not continue to do so, the mythopoeic urge being infinite. This understanding is what we are calling radical typology. Where orthodox typology [an example of which would be viewing Christ as the fulfillment of the type that Moses incarnates] works in terms of closure, radical typology works in terms of disclosure. (108)Orthodox typology is essentially allegorical in its functioning, the word "allegory" deriving from the Greek, allos, or "other"; that is to say that, "[a]llegorical tales are those which in effect announce, or are made to announce, their own intention: to say this in terms of that. Thus the 'other' is always subsumed under the 'same'" (Coupe 105). No matter how many levels of meaning an allegory might feature, it is still limited and fairly static in comparison with radical typology, which possesses the power of story or narrative.
The place, language, people and customs I knew had all been removed from me by the simple act of boarding this flying vehicle; and these, for most of us, are the four anchors of the soul. . . . I felt as if all the roots of my self had been torn up like those of the flying trees from Abraham's atrium. . . . I was alone in a mystery. (383).Moraes's plight is Rushdie's plight. Fantasy is sometimes a subversion and a line of escape, but it is also a scream in a prison cell, a cry from "Pandaemonium" (5). In the end a "banished," sick, debilitated Moor chooses, like Rip Van Winkle, to go to sleep, to give himself over to the final transformation; he becomes his fiction, the final page in the da Gama- Zogoiby family saga.
Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of BelŽm to the Malabar Coast . . . . English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India -- but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? -- we were "not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment" . . . . From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight clear. . . . "They came for the hot stuff." (4-5)
[It] was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of all Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. (350)Rushdie as an orientalist of a different order views the world from a vantage point whose center is neither Lisbon nor London nor Paris, but Bombay; furthermore, it is not so much History as a unified, definitive series of events and personnages that interests him, but rather the world as an "ocean of stories" whose historians are Shahrazad-like raconteurs, the oriental storyteller par excellence. The novel, then, is less about a decentering in the spirit of a narrowly conceived critique from the margins, but rather, about an assertion of the potential of the imagination, of the capacity of stories, to discern and envision realities.
Just as the fanatical "Catholic Kings" has besieged Granada and awaited the Alhambra's fall, so now barbarism was standing at our gates. O Bombay! . . . Star of the East with her face to the West! Like Granada . . . you were the glory of your time. But a darker time came upon you, and just as Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, was too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting. For the barbarians were no only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses . . . . We were both the bombers and the bombs . . . . And now can only weep, at the last, for what we were too enfeebled, too corrupt . . . to defend. (372-373)In the final lines of this passage, Rushdie rewrites the legendary words of Ayxa to Boabdil upon the flight from Granada: "Well may you weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man" (80). Although the tone of this passage attempts to signal a serious rather than a mocking or parodic commentary, even the patient, careful reader must wonder -- after so much inversion, mixing of messages, and linguistic shenanigans -- whether Rushdie can possibly make a moral statement at this point in the narrative. The author's recasting, five-hundred years later, of an episode of the Boabdil legend into a commentary on fundamentalist violence in India and around the world does attempt to convey one. Identity, conceived within a narrow framework, can only be destructive; essentialist identity is dead, although the blood it sheds continues to flow in a number of places around the world.
. . . sky-high above crowds and gods, year after year -- for forty-one years in all -- fearless upon precipitous ramparts of our Malabar Hill bungalow, which in a spirit of ironic mischief she had insisted on naming Elephanta, there twirled the almost-divine figure of our very own Aurora Bombayalis, plumed in a series of dazzle-hued mirrorwork outfits, in finery even the festival sky with its hanging gardens of powdered colour. Her white hair flying out around her in long loose exclamations (O prophetically premature white hair of my ancestors!) . . . speaking incomprehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt for the perversity of humankind . . . . (123-124)Aurora Bombayalis -- like the inspired poet of "flashing eyes" and "floating hair" in the third stanza of "Kubla Khan" -- becomes semi-divine, an aurora borealis, the goddess of the dawn. And just as in Coleridge's poem, whose figure in reverie seeks to synthesize antinomies, Aurora's dance poses a question that goes to the center of the novel's project and its vision of the world: which is greater, "human perversity" or "human heroism"? (124). "Whatever today's excess, tomorrow's will exceed-o it," Aurora exclaims (124). So it would seem that perversity finally is going to win. The underlying mythic narratives of the novel concerns this battle between evil and good, between a tyranny that enforces a narrowing of human vision and a struggle to keep it from firmly closing.
