Book Review: Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie

Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie  
Random House 2020
London
390 pages          

The late Tom Wolfe, journalist turned author, whose major novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, appeared in 1987, complained that many modern novelists failed to do enough research regarding the themes broached by their novels. If he were alive today, he certainly would not have included Rushdie among those novelists whose lack of planning and whose unfamiliarity with details is readily apparent. Quichotte is as complex and detailed as a Tibetan sand mandala.

The well thought-out many layered plot contains fictions within fictions, some of them "written" by a fictive character of the novel. It is done so well that as we open each Babushka doll, as it were, we are surprised, even delighted; he maintains this artistry to the very end of the novel as we open the last doll, and are left with, well, nothing.

This, in keeping with the Quichotte tradition, is a picaresque novel with a very complex plot. The constant progress of the story line, including many twists and turns, is very entertaining. The theme of the novel, however, is bleak. In Rushdie’s words, pertaining to  the fictive author of the doubly fictive Quichotte character:

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age.

Nothing very ambitious, then, she (his sister) said. 

                                                               --page 289

                                                     

Rushdie is being ironic here, for his novel is very ambitious indeed.

At one point in the narrative, it is asserted that only two attitudes to life are valid: one, that life has meaning, albeit a hidden one; and two, entropy wins, thus life has no meaning at all. Entropy does indeed win. The end of the novel reminded me of Macbeth’s famous lines, that life...”is full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing.”

The novel is very much about the Indian diaspora, symbolic of the near impossibility of finding a solid home in a world where "the center no longer holds.” The main characters of the novel, including the characters Quichotte's fictive creator invents, all hail from India. They have changed their names to better assimilate—Ismail, for instance, becomes Smile—but it doesn’t really work. Even if they feel at home in the West; even if they marry Westerners, they are more than occasionally reminded that their skin tone prevents them from being fully accepted. They wind up being at home nowhere, not in India, Pakistan, the United States or Britain. This describes, perhaps, Rushdie’s own view. After partition, Rusdie’s father chose Pakistan, while Rushdie chose to remain in India. Rushdie subsequently moved to Britain. Can one imagine Rushdie at home in the England of Brexit, in the India of Modi, in the Pakistan of Khan, or in the United States of Trump? I think not.

Rushdie is an expert story teller, as evinced by the wonderful tale of Ayesha in The Satanic Verses. A parallel to that tale is the equally beautiful, if sad, story of Sancho. Seeking love like his doubly fictive father, he takes a bus where he encounters the blue fairy in the form of an old woman—the blue fairy is central to the Pinocchio tale of a puppet being transformed into a real boy; Sancho is on his way to see “Beautiful from Beautiful, Kansas” a young Indian woman he had encountered on the journey cross-country with Quichotte. (Jiminy Cricket, you guessed it, had previously appeared to Sancho in the form of an Italian-speaking cricket, the Grillo Parlante, They have lively exchanges, in English and in Italian. Ruhsdie’s humor, however, fails here, a least for me.) Just as he rings the doorbell of Beautiful, from Beautiful, he disappears, since he is no longer an integral part of Quichotte’s imagination. It is a beautifully told tale; no Disney ending here, however. The tale, like the novel, ends in annihilation.

For Rushdie, however, a story is more than just a story. If life has no meaning, stories, quintessentially human, are what give life meaning, at least on a temporary basis. Religious faith is no longer possible for secularists like Rushdie; other fictions, such as nationalism, etc. are no longer possible either. Even Quichotte’s quest for romantic love is mocked; Quichotte’s quest begins only after his so-called, Internal Event, his stroke. Prior to this, he was, apparently, more rational.

There is one exception to the belief that life has no meaning. It is the belief in some form of the Golden Rule. If life truly had no meaning, all the mean-spirited characters of the book would be as valid as the kind ones. What makes junk culture junk culture, the windmill aimed at by the lance of Rusdie’s prose, is its inhumanity, its assault on the truth that we should treat neighbors with love and kindness.

The center no longer holds, but the center is still there. There is apparently a warm ocean beneath ten miles of solid ice on one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. Who, standing on the frozen surface, would be aware that life potentially exists far beneath his feet? Viewed metaphorically, every lie, every conspiracy theory, buries the source of potential life deeper and deeper. 

The book offers No Exit. At the end, the main doubly fictive characters, Salma R. and Quichotte, try to escape a collapsing world by transportation to another Earth, a system devised by Evel Cent, formally known as Awwal Sant. It doesn’t work. They are instead transported to the room of the dying fictive man who created them:

He saw the first minute creature enter, gasp, and faint, its hope turning to despair… The microscopic man, the creature of the Author’s imagination, had brilliantly done the impossible and joined the two worlds, had crossed over from the world of Fancy into the Author’s real world, but in this one he was unassimilable, helpless, puny, gasping for air, not finding it, choking, and so lost.

Stop! cried the Author, knowing what would happen next, the thing he could not stop, for he had already written it; it had already happened, so it could not be prevented from happening. His heart pounded, feeling as if it might burst from his chest. Everything was coming to an end.

The end cannot be changed after it has ended, not the end of the universe, not the death of an Author, nor the end of two precious, even if very small, human lives.
     

There they stood in the gateway, on the threshold of an impossible dream: Miss Salma R and her Quichotte.
                                                                      page 390
                                                                        

Entropy wins again! This is an entropic version of Alice having fallen trough the Rabbit Hole. Here, however, there will be no vials marked Eat Me and Drink Me; there will be no Cheshire Cat, no Mad Hatter, no Queen of Hearts, no anything.

It is a tribute to Rushdie’s genius that he is able to entertain us so fabulously as we gaze into the kaleidoscope of his creation, fascinated by its many moving jewels. We are delighted throughout; most of us moderns are able to handle the bleak ending as well. For as Buddha taught in his doctrine of anicca, everything changes; most of us now are aware that nothing is permanent, everything in the universe must come to a (non-Disney) end. Even great novels.