How Does Newness Come Into the World?

NATIVE COSMOPOLITANS

MARIA DIBATTISTA

The contemporary fascination with cosmopolitanism as a moral and political ideal is one response to the widespread, seemingly irreversible changes in the way human beings think about their relation to their family, tribe, community, country. What we can discern behind the headlines, in the marketplaces, and through the literature of the present day is that the era of identity politics is waning and the age of global character is struggling to be born. What form it will take is a riddle the novel can help solve. The novel has more and more been absorbed in chronicling the emergence of a new social type that I call “native cosmopolitans”. Their growing prominence, which has aroused the curiosity, anxiety and imagination of novelists like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Karin Desai, Edwige Danticat, represents a new form and hope for character: formed in the enduring ethos of local traditions and habits, but marked (stunned, traumatized, exhilarated) by the consciousness that one is more connected to, yet less at home in the global cities in which their destinies are often decided.

“How does newness come into the world?” is a question posed by entrepreneurs, social engineers, makers of legislation, cultural anthro- pologists, mad men and novelists preoccupied with the changing fortunes of human character. This particular version of the question is posed at the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, where it alerts us that the world we have known, often (if we are lucky) have loved, and sometimes despaired of, is approaching exhaustion and that now is the time to be wondering where and how to introduce something new and vital into its depleted midst. Rushdie begins his search for an answer where a novelist would instinctively look – in an image of human creatures undergoing, in this instance suffering, metamorphosis: two distinct figures (both actors, hence already accomplished in, and presumably devoted to, the arts of self-transformation) plummeting from the sky after the plane in which they were traveling explodes, instantly transformed into a “seedpod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery”. As they plunge toward the earth, they apparently still have enough of their wits about them to 76 Maria DiBattista wonder: “Who am I? / Who else is there?”1 Given that physical extinction appears to be just seconds away, questions about who we are and if we are accompanied are almost comically irrelevant. The absurdity of asking them in such dire circum- stances is itself evidence of how serious Rushdie considers them to be. From such slender, but undeniably dramatic evidence, we might deduce two axiomatic principles concerning the genesis and enduring preoccupations of the novel as a distinct cultural form. First axiom: the novel, even those which forswear the verbal and scenic wonders, calculated outrages and preposterous scenarios of Rushdiean fantasy, is a seedpod bursting with germinating life. Second axiom: the novel, whatever its chosen environment, narrative idiom and plot trajectory, is generically disposed to ask two primary questions about the character of human life: the first we might call the Crusoe question, the question of the solitary human being confronted with the physical and moral reality of his unique existence; the second is also a Crusoe question and follows upon the first – who else is there taking up space and moral room beside and among us? Yet while there may be nothing particularly new in the questions even the most up-to-date fiction asks of its characters, there seems to be less and less islanded, private space in which to ask them. Character wants room, as Emerson advised (and warned) us, but in the new millennium, when more and more life is lived in overcrowded, over-scrutinized spaces, such open expanses for the development, exploration, reinvention or consolidation of character are rapidly contracting: those that remain are not easily accessible or hardly habitable, like the bleak South African hinterlands of J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K or Wait- ing for the Barbarians or the ravaged post-apocalyptic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In such conditions, the questions facing characters free-falling into modernity are, as Rushdie’s desperate fiction suggests, perhaps best, even if hurriedly, asked, in mid-air, “the most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous metamorphic”. Rushdie, driven by temperament and the barbarisms of modern history into brash, desperate and absurdist comedy, seems to relish the notion that once “you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible”. We might protest at the untested confidence conveyed by that “anything”, yet be perfectly

1 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, New York: Picador, 2000, 4.