In Rough Country (18 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“Witchcraft” is usually associated with females: in Rushdie's fevered cosmology these are invariably
femmes fatales
of the species to which the spectacularly beautiful webspyder Neela Mahendra of
Fury
belongs. Rushdie wryly mocks what are clearly his own obsessions: the yellow-haired traveler recalls having fallen in love with a Florentine prostitute who was born with only one breast which, “by way of compensa
tion, was the most beautiful breast in the city, which was to sayâ¦in all the known world.” Another legendary Florentine beauty is Simonetta Cattaneo who possesses “a pale, fair beauty so intense that no man could look at her without falling into a state of molten adoration, nor could any woman, and the same went for most of the city's cats and dogs.” Qara Koz, the “Hidden Princess,” said to be a descendent of Genghis Khan and preposterously claimed by the yellow-haired traveler to be his mother, is yet more beautiful, a goddess of beauty, whether in her Mughal identity as “Lady Dark Eyes” or as the “Enchantress of Florence” this paragon of enchantment first appears in a magic mirror owned by the sinister Medici family, as a vision of unearthly beauty, “a visitor from another world” she is meant “for palaces, and kings” when she and her “mirror-self” servant are first glimpsed in Florence, brought back by the (Florentine) warrior-hero Argalia, it's “as if the Madonna had materialized”:
l'ammaliatrice Angelica
, the so-called enchantress of Florence, brought men running from the fields, and women from their kitchensâ¦Woodcutters came from the forests and the butcher Gabburra's son ran out from the slaughterhouse with bloody hands and potters left their kilnsâ¦[T]heir faces shone with the light of revelation, as though in those early days of their unveiling they were capable of sucking light in from the eyes of all who looked upon them and then flinging it out again as their own personal brilliance, with mesmeric, fantasy-inducing effects.
And, yet more fantastical:
Within moments of her coming she had been taken to the city's heart as its special face, its new symbol of itself, the incarnation in human form of that unsurpassable loveliness which the city itself possessed. The Dark Lady of Florence.
Somehow, this Mughal princess who has, so far as the reader is allowed to know, never been educated, has learned to speak perfect Florentine Italian, in the modest effort, as her lover Argalia announces to all of Florence:
[Qara Koz] comes here of her own free will, in the hope of forging a union between the great cultures of Europe and the East, knowing that she has much to learn from us and believing, too, that she has much to teach.
This declaration comes out of nowhere for there has been no previous hint that Qara Koz, or the macho warrior-hero Argalia, has the slightest interest or awareness of anything like the “great cultures” of the world: their tales have been
Arabian Nights
in tone, affably improbable and very far from intellectual. Yet the claim has been made by the yellow-haired traveler who spins out his story at the Mughal court:
When the great warrior Argalia met the immortal beauty Qara Kozâ¦a story began which would regenerate all men's beliefâyour belief, grand Mughalâ¦in the undying
power and extraordinary capacity of the human heart for love.
“Love” seems a paltry word to describe the stunned adoration everyone in Rushdie's novel feels for Qara Koz who, even when she is beyond the zenith of her powers of enchantment, as she begins to lose her youthâshe's twenty-six, and had begun her career as a sexual enchantress at seventeenâcommands this sort of authority from the macho seafaring adventurer Andrea Doria:
[the princess's] face was illumined by an unearthly light, so that she reminded Andrea Doria of Christ himself, the Nazarene performing His miracles, Christ multiplying loaves and fishes or raising Lazarus from the deadâ¦Her powers were failing but she intended to exercise them one last time as they had never been exercised before, and force the history of the world into the course she required it to take. She would enchant the middle passage into being by the sheer force of her sorcery and her willâ¦[Andrea Doria] fell to his knees before herâ¦He thought of Christ in Gethsemane and how He must have looked to His disciples as He prepared Himself to die.
Where the enchantress Neela Mahendra of
Fury
is exposed as a man-eating Erinye, the Mughal princess Qara Koz is revealed as Christ the Savior. From the deconstructionist post-modernist perspective perhaps all myths are equally possible, as all myths
are absurd? (In
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Haroun's compulsively storytelling father Rashid confesses: “What to do, sonâ¦Storytelling is the only work I know.”
No contemporary writer has so fetishized femaleness as Salman Rushdie, with unflagging zeal, idealism, and irony, in fiction after fiction: Rushdie's portrait in
The Enchantress of Florence
of the great Mughal painter Dashwanth would seem to be a self-portrait of the artist so heedlessly infatuated with his subject that he loses his soul to it and disappears into the artwork:
[Dashwanth] was working on what would turn out to be the final picture of the so-called
Qara-Koz-Nama
, the Adventures of Lady Black Eyesâ¦In spite of the almost constant scrutiny of his peers he had somehow managed to vanish. He was never seen again, not in the Mughal court, nor anywhere in Sikri, not anywhere in all the land of Hindustan.
Eventually, Dashwanth is discovered beneath a border of the portrait, miniaturized, in two dimensions, “crouching down like a little toadâ¦Instead of bringing a fantasy woman to life, Dashwanth had turned himself into an imaginary being, drivenâ¦by the overwhelming force of love.”
By the novel's end the “barren” Mughal princess has been absorbed into the emperor Akbar's
khayal
, “his god-like omnipotent fancy” having taken the place of his fantasy-queen Jodha. Even the most extraordinary female in the history of mankind is finally just a man's fancy, as Qara Koz has been the author's:
“I have come home after all,” she told [Akbar]. “You have allowed me to return, and so here I am, at my journey's end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours.”
Until you're not
, the Universal Ruler thought.
My love, until you're not.
How wonderfully ironic, and appropriate, that in the final lines of Rushdie's ingeniously constructed post-modernist “romance” the fevered sex-spell is finally broken: male omnipotence out-trumps the most powerful female sorcery, in time.
Â
Amid this exotic
Arabian Nights
romance of hidden princesses, lonely emperors and brash young travelers from the West is a second romance, almost entirely separate from the first, a highly eroticized male romance involving the storyteller Vespucci's boyhood friends in Florence in the later years of the fifteenth century, one of whom is destined to become the celebrated and controversial author of
The Prince
: “In the beginning there were three friends, Antonino Argalia, Niccolò âil Machia,' and Ago Vespucci.” This story-opening is repeated several times through the hundreds of pages of
The Enchantress of Florence
as the story moves away from Florence, then returns; and moves away, and returns; and finally moves away again, to vanish into the Mughal emperor's all-absorbing
khayal
. Since the storyteller is Ago Vespucci (who has renamed himself “Niccolò”) it's within his power to shift his scene at will, to evoke the past, or the future, to challenge the reader's capacity to keep characters straight by frequently renaming them, and to gleefully, tirelessly digressâhow like Haroun's
storyteller father the “Shah of Blah” for whom “straight answers were beyond [his] powersâ¦who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.” After a boyhood that seems to have been spent largely fantasizing over “having occult powers over women”â“in the woods most days climbing trees and masturbating for mandrakes and telling each other insane stories”âboth Argalia and Vespucci leave Florence and become high-concept adventurers (Argalia becomes Pasha Avcalia the Turk, a warrior for the Ottoman empire; Vespucci becomes a world traveler) while the more intellectual and politically ambitious Niccolò “il Machia” remains behind, a brooding (if bawdy) center of skeptical consciousness meant to mirror the philosopher-king Akbar. Though the two men never meet they are kindred spiritsâNiccolò Machiavelli would have been another of Akbar's “sons,” had Akbar known himâquestioning religious tradition and the culture in which each has been born as well as the nature of human identity. These words of the young Machiavelli would be appropriate for Akbar as well:
He believed in the hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that the truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of which were aspects of the surface deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected
from the whatness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.
Similarly Akbar, when he is not required by the author to play the buffoon-despot or the credulous fool taken in by a yellow-haired Westerner's tall tale:
It is man at the center of things, not god. It is man at the heart and the bottom and the top, man at the front and the back and the side, man the angel and the devil, the miracle and the sin, man and always man, and let us henceforth have no other temples but those dedicated to mankind. This was his unspeakable ambition: to found the religion of man.
It may be doubtful that the historic Akbar the Great ever thought such post-Enlightenment thoughts but Rushdie eloquently provides him with the most chilling possibility of all, by which the tragic timeliness of
The Enchantress of Florence
âand the author's intention in writing itâis underscored:
(If man had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it possible for a creation to escape the power of the creator? Could a god, once created, become impossible to destroy? Did such fictions acquire an autonomy of the will that made them immortal?â¦)
Both men are fascinated by the contents of their own minds, the emperor in his “omnipotence” led to brood over the nature of his own massive identity:
He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as “I,” not even in privateâ¦He wasâwhat else could he be?â“we.” He was the definition, the Incarnation of the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said “we” he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakesâ¦he meant himself as the apogee of his people's past and present, and the engine of their futureâ¦[But] could he, too, be an “I?” Could there be an “I” that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary “I's” buried beneath the overcrowded “we's” of the earth?
(Ironically, when Akbar tries to establish himself as an “I” separate from the “we” of his role as emperor, he is rebuffed by his fantasy-queen Jodha, his mirror-self.)
2
Though his role in the novel is a minor and muted one, Machiavelli emerges as the novel's most intriguing character, for Rushdie has given him a distinctly contemporary personality and keeps him, for the most part, free of the distracting romance-plot with its typically inflated and jocose prose; Machiavelli is the quintessential Renaissance Florentine, a mixture of the high-minded and the lasvicious (“Il Machiaâ¦seemed to be the reincarnation of the god Priapus, always ready for action” 3) involved in political scheming even in his youth, and highly ambitious; when the Medicis ascend to power in Florence with the election of a Medici Pope, Machiavelli falls into disfavor, and, in scenes Rushdie chooses not to dramatize, terribly tortured. His spirit is broken:
[The people of Florence] did not deserve himâ¦The pain that had coursed through his body was not pain but knowledge. It was an educational pain followed by confession followed by death. The people had wanted his death, or at least had not cared if he lived or died. In the city that gave the world the idea of the value and freedom of the individual soul they had not valued himâ¦
An old man at forty-four yet Machiavelli too falls under the predictably hypnotic spell of Qara Koz and experiences a temporary respite from his gloom; when the Mughal princess departs Florence, his depression returns. In the wan hope of regaining favor at court Machiavelli immerses himself into “his little mirror-of-princes piece, such a dark mirror that even he feared it might not be liked” this is
The Prince
, though Rushdie doesn't name it, and the year must be about 1518; Machiavelli would die in 1527.
Though
The Enchantress of Florence
includes a densely printed six-page bibliography of historical books and articles and is being described as an “historical” novel, readers in expectation of a conventional “historical novel” should be forewarned: this is “history” jubilantly mixed with post-modernist magic realism. The veteran performer-author is too playful and too much the exuberant stylist to incorporate much of deadpan “reality” into his ever-shifting, ever-teasing narrative of the power of enchantment of cultural opposites: “We are their dreamâ¦and they are ours.”
T
he landscape of Philip Roth's America is a familiar oneâmostly urban New Jersey and New York City, more recently suburban or semi-rural Connecticut. Yet, as in some of those eerie paintings of Eric Fischl in which the real is permeated by the surreal, especially where adolescent males are involved, the landscape is honeycombed with land mines and to traverse it is to enter a realm of peril. In this world outside the close-knit family unit “the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences”âas the increasingly deranged father of Roth's
Indignation
(2008) warns his nineteen-year-old son Marcus. As in a 1950s American recrudescence of Old-Testament biblical foreboding, it's the male issue that is most at risk for Jews, for hasn't Mr. Messner the kosher butcher been warned by his friend Pearlgreen the plumber: “Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it's licking its chops, to take your boy away.” At its high-pitched mock-hysterical climax
Indignation
expands its focus to take in the riveting political oratory of an Ohio politician in his guise as the president of a small liberal arts college wonderfully named Winesburg College, in whose
fury at the transgressions of undergraduate boys caught up in the frenzy of a panty raid there is struck the note of 1950s Cold War America, the very font of comic-patriotic paranoia:
We as a nation are facing the distinct possibility of an atomic war with the Soviet Union, all the while the men of Winesburg College are conducting their derring-do raids on the dresser drawers of [their female classmates]â¦How's it going to serve you when a thousand screaming Chinese soldiers come swarming down on you in your foxhole, should these negotiations in Korea break down?
In Roth's earlier novel of counter-factual America
The Plot Against America
(2004) this alarming prophetic note is struck in its opening passage:
Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.
(Here is a bold opening worthy of Franz Kafka whose “The Metamorphosis” famously declared its young male protagonist changed overnight into a gigantic beetleâanother inspired variant upon a joke.) If the proposition at the heart of
The Plot Against America
is something like a jokeâthat aviation hero/Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh is elected in a “landslide victory” over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential electionâit quickly becomes a menacing joke as young
Jews begin to be recruited, so to speak, under the auspices of a federal program called “Just Folks”âa creation of Lindbergh's newly created Office of American Absorption as a “volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life”âand at last a tragic joke, a nightmare-joke as “resisting” Jews are killed by patriotic “just folks” and the rightward-leaning United States prepares to enter into what will be World War II not on the side of England and En gland's allies but on the side of Hitler and Hitler's allies, Italy and Japan. Indeed, there may be war with Canada. FDR is “detained” along with so-called Roosevelt Jews and rabbis are arrested in the frenzied months before, as Roth's narrator Philip informs us in a hurried aside in the last chapter, Lindbergh's politics are discredited and Roosevelt is back in the White House.
At the heart of
The Human Stain
(2001) is the joke as exemplum: a joke of the most absurd “political correctness” in the context of the media hysteria of 1998 when President Bill Clinton was vilified for months as an adulterer and as a liar in contempt of court in his disclaimer of having had no “sexual relations” with the twenty-one-year-old White House aide Monica Lewinsky; this “time of nausea” as Roth's narrator Nathan Zuckerman describes it. As in
The Plot Against America
, “some sort of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered, âWhy are we so crazy?'” but here, in the late 1990s, the craziness isn't right-wing Nazi fanaticism but a leftist tyranny of manners in which the most casual, innocent, and utterly trivial of remarks can bring down an academician as distinguished as Coleman Silkâlovely name for a very suave man!!âwho'd been “one of the first of the
Jews permitted to teach in a classics department anywhere in America” and, more notably, “the first and only Jew to ever serve as a dean of the faculty at Athena College”âa small prestigious New England college not unlike Amherst. Allegedly, the incident is based upon an actual “political correctness” case investigated at Princeton University in the 1990s, though this fact, if it is a fact, has not been verified by the author, nor should it be; the incident is exemplary, illustrative of the shibboleths of the era:
It was about midway into [the] second semester that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him voluntarily to sever all ties to the collegeâthe single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athenaâ¦
The class consisted of fourteen students. Coleman had taken attendance at the beginning of the first several lectures so as to learn their names. As there were still two names that failed to elicit a response by the fifth weekâ¦Coleman opened the session by asking, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”
As Coleman utters the word “spooks”âin a mangled interpretation a racist insult directed at the two students who happened to be not only absent but blackâhis fate is determined: he is vilified as a racist at the college by a majority of students and his enemies among the faculty, so excessively that his sixty-four-year-old wife Iris dies of a cerebral hemorrhageâthe joke as curse. In Zuckerman's eyes “political correctness”
is risibleâridiculousâeven as, like the “Just Folks” patriots of
The Plot Against America
, it is deadly serious, and dangerous. Even
Portnoy's Complaint
(1969), for many readers the most famous of Roth's novels and very likely recalled as a protracted adolescent joke of obsessive-compulsive sexual behavior, is, in essence, a desperate plea for help; a frantic confession to a (faceless) psychoanalyst; a candid acknowledgment of, not sexual potency, but sexual impotence; though an adult, eager to lead an adult life, Alex Portnoy is never other than Mrs. Portnoy's son.
More clearly the “Tricky Dick” narrator of
Our Gang
(1971)âthe weasely master of hypocrisy President Richard Nixonâis an extended, boldly orchestrated joke, as
The Great American Novel
(1973), a chronicle of the misadventures of a 1940s professional baseball team that has been expunged from baseball history, is a joke of another, less portentous kind, in the playful 1970s mode of Robert Coover's
The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
In an abashed echo of Kafka the hapless narrator of
The Breast
(1972) can describe himselfâhis altered selfâin pseudo-scientific terms that strike a note of pure wacky jokiness, absurdity:
I am a breast. A phenomenon that has been variously described to me as “a massive hormonal influx,” “an endocrinopathic catastrophe,” and/or “a hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes” took place within my body between midnight and 4
A.M
. on February 1971 and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from any human formâ¦
They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of spongy consistency, weighing one hundred fifty poundsâ¦and measuring, still, six feet in length. [I am a] breast of the mammalian female.
My Life as a Man
(1974) and
The Professor of Desire
(1977) are memoirist fictions of the utmost seeming sincerity, narrated by young male writers resembling Roth in salient ways; here, if there are jokes, they are not so much nightmare-jokes as riddles. In
My Life as a Man
the novelist Peter Tarnopol is confounded by his ill-advised marriage to a “rough” young woman named Maureen and his musings upon the nature of male-female relations are as funny as anything in Roth, though underscored by gravity verging upon despair:
Unattached and on her own (in the 1950s), a woman was supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheldâby marrying them. If we didn't marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.
Peter Tarnopol, a reader of serious literatureâHenry James, Joseph Conrad, Gustave Flaubertâdismisses mere happiness with a woman in favor of something more demanding and problematic, thus more “literary”â
What I likedâ¦was something taxing in my love affairs, something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going⦠I liked most being with young women who gave me something to think aboutâ¦
So Maureen was a rough customerâI thought about that. I wondered if I was “up”ânice wordâto someone with her history and determination.
Tarnopol is devastated by both the wreck of his marriage and his stupidity in entering into it; his inability to cope with married life, and his failure to comprehend how he'd come to such a pass at the age of twenty-six. A year previously
I would have laughed had anyone suggested that struggling with a woman over a marriage would come to occupy me in the way that exploring the South Pole had occupied Admiral Byrdâor writing
Madame Bovary
had occupied Flaubert.
Maureen is a seasoned liar, outrageous, funny, disarming; the reader perceives her helplessness and desperation even as her slightly younger husband Tarnopol, fuming like a TV situation-comedy husband, is deceived by the ways in which she inventively casts herself as a “victim”âMaureen is a would-be actress, after all. She's provocative, and Tarnopol is a foil to be provoked. Roth gives Maureen the most dramatic crises:
“Do it! Kill me! Some man's going toâwhy not a âcivilized' one like you! Why not a follower of Flaubert!” Here she collapsed against me, and with her arms around my neck,
began to sob. “Oh, Peter, I don't have anything. Nothing at all. I'm really lost, baby⦔
Shrewd Maureen takes advantage of Tarnopol's naiveté by pretending to be pregnant; she knows how to play upon his sympathies as a “civilized” person even as she funnily berates him:
“I've taken enough from men like you in my life! You're going to marry me or I'm going to kill myself! And I will do itâ¦This is no idle threat, PeterâI cannot take you people any more! You selfish, spoiled, immature, irresponsible Ivy League bastards, born with those spoons in your mouthsâ¦With your big fat advance and your high Artâoh, you make me sick the way you hide from life behind that
Art
of yours! I hate you and I hate that fucking Flaubert, and you are going to marry me, Peter, because I have had enough!”
In true literary fashion, Tarnopol berates himself: “I could not be the cause of another's death. Such a suicide was murder. So I would marry her instead”âthough in fact he hates her, having been “blackmailed, threatened, and terrorized” by her.
Yes, it was indeed one of those grim and unyielding predicaments such as I had read about in fiction, such as Thomas Mann⦓All actuality is deadly earnest, and it is mortality itself that, one with life, forbids us to be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth.”
It seemed then that I was making one of those moral decisions that I had heard so much about in college literary
courses. But how different it all had been up there in the Ivy League, when it was happening to Lord Jim and Kate Croy and Ivan Karamazov instead of to me. Oh, what an authority on dilemmas I had been in the senior honors seminar!â¦I expected to find in everyday experience that same sense of the difficult and the deadly earnest that informed the novels I admired most. My model of reality, deduced from reading the masters, had at its heart
intractability
.
In Maureen, who is pure
intractability
, the aspiring young literary man is overmatched: reduced to a “twenty-six-year-old baby boy.”
But it's in
Indignation
that the tragic joke is most evident, and most devastating. Roth has so constructed this short, deftly narrated novel that the background of the Korean War is always evident yet in a way invisible, like sceneryâit's the petty, vexing concerns of Marcus Messner that preoccupy him as a transfer student to Winesburg College where, like an undergraduate Everyman, inappropriately serious, devoted to his studies, unwilling to compromise his beliefs, a young man of unusual integrity, he's exploited by his roommates and abused as a waiterâ“More than a few times during the first weeks, I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with the words, âHey, Jew! Over here!' But, preferring to believe the words spoken had been simply, âHey, you! Over here!' I persisted with my duties.” Despite his high intelligence and his wish to graduate as valedictorian of his class and enter law schoolâhis wish to please his father, for whom he has such ambivalent feelingsâMarcus makes one comical blunder
after another at folksy Winesburg; he is literally if obliquely done in by failing to satisfy the college's compulsory chapel attendance. Expelled from college, Marcus is vulnerable to the draft and within a few breathless paragraphs he has been killed in Korea, along with one hundred eighty-eight young men, out of two hundred, in his company. After our intimacy with Marcus, the cruel abruptness with which his life ends is jarring, distressing. The entire text of
Indignation
has been a lament, or a rant; in a featureless nether world resembling the Hades of antiquity, though without the comfort of fellow ghosts of that Hades, Marcus Messner cries out forlornly for his father, his mother, his girlfriend; he berates himselfâ“If only he had gone to chapel!”