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“Bastardizing” the Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie's Grimus

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“Bastardizing” the Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie's Grimus Commonwealth Essays and Studies 34.2 | 2012 Reappraisals “Bastardizing” The Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus Mélanie Heydari-Malayeri Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/5507 DOI: 10.4000/ces.5507 ISSN: 2534-6695 Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth) Printed version Date of publication: 1 April 2012 Number of pages: 81-90 ISSN: 2270-0633 Electronic reference Mélanie Heydari-Malayeri, ““Bastardizing” The Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 34.2 | 2012, Online since 19 April 2021, connection on 23 July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/5507 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.5507 Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. “Bastardizing” The Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus Grimus has been largely ignored by postcolonial critics and is seldom studied on its own terms. This paper examines the iconoclastic, pattern-breaking pattern of Rushdie’s first novel. A parody of The Conference of the Birds – an allegory by the major twelfth-century Persian poet Attar – Grimus is characterized by a carnivalesque sense of the world. The novel challenges the foundation upon which this masterpiece of Sufi literature is constructed, revealing Rushdie’s deep-seated aversion to the bogey of authenticity. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new combinations that make them new. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories 86 Grimus is Salman Rushdie’s least read novel. It occupies a special place in Rushdie’s opus. Not only is it the author’s first novel, but it also seems to be rather depreciated, as if fated to suffer a peculiar kind of oblivion.1 It was not enthusiastically received when it was first published in 1975, and Rushdie’s own subsequent estimation of the novel was likewise very harsh.2 When compared to later works, it is true that Grimus seems to lack confidence in what it is attempting to be, as if the novel did not dare rely on the power of fiction. Rushdie’s ostentatious display of mastery – reminiscent of a young peacock flaunting its colorful feathers – and his heavy, abstruse pronouncements cer- tainly lack the humor and linguistic exuberance distinctive of his later fiction, and have an unfortunate effect on the novel, stripping it of emotion and preventing any real en- gagement in the narrative. Grimus is rarely studied on its own terms, either because the novel is viewed solely as a womb in which later concerns of Rushdie’s writing gestate, or because it does not comply with currently fashionable issues and looks suspect, as it were, in terms of its postcolonial credentials. The critics who have delved into Grimus have privileged a polarized, somewhat schematic reading of the text, as is epitomized by Mujeedbuddin Syed’s analysis of the novel which first envisions Grimus as an “early manifesto of Rushdie’s heterodoxical themes and innovative techniques” only to end up chastizing the novel for giving no indication of the author’s future interests as it fails “to countenance postcolonial concerns” (148). As a matter of fact, it is precisely because the novel resists pigeonholing that this all-encompassing, protean work – torn as it is between its futurist aspects3 and its impudent variation on a poetical, mystical tradition 1. Many critics have expressed doubts about Grimus. Catherine Cundy rates it poorly in comparison to Rushdie’s subsequent works: “Its indebtedness to other literary forms exceeds the cleverly allusive to overstretch itself in often tedious mimicry of other writers. With its adolescent conceits and punning, its loss of narrative control and its uninvol- ving characters, it is very much a test-run for the successful novels of the 1980s” (12). Timothy Brennan suggests that “Grimus fails even though it is carried off with professional brilliance simply because it lacks habitus.” “It doesn’t know where it is,” Brennan contends, but “‘tries’ on cultures like used clothing” (70). 2. “As a writer, my worst mistake was my first novel. My first novel, Grimus – the one, mercifully, no one reads” (Chauhan 157). 3. The author submitted his manuscript of Grimus to a science fiction writing contest. Many critics have noted the limits of this classification, arguing that science fiction cannot work except with actuality as a springboard: “In Grimus, 82 – deserves minute examination. Grimus draws heavily on the carnivalized folklore ana- lyzed by Bakhtin:4 this paper explores the process of bastardization that is the novel’s most crucial dynamic. Whilst the verb “bastardize” appears only once in the novel,5 this phenomenon, which is invested with a highly positive significance in Rushdie’s works,6 as it bespeaks the interpenetration of cultures and inveighs against any cultural or lite- rary paradigm based on purity, operates at a structural level in Grimus. Through a paro- dic transcontextualization that is foremost an act of translation from the realm of the absolute to the precarious space of the fictional, the author opens up a reinterpretative space, playfully subverting the authority of the canon. The Conference of the Birds as a Decisive Hypotext Significantly, Grimus is the only novel by Salman Rushdie that originates from ano- ther book, with a purely literary beginning, thus ironically questioning the very notion of “conceptualization” ─ which refers to the power of willing something out of no- thing ─ on which the novel relies. In fact, the undetermined topography of the novel – an imaginary island situated somewhere in the Mediterranean, straddling the West and the East – reveals Grimus to be a literary experiment, in compliance with the traditional function of islands in literature as experimental laboratories. More than a mere setting, Calf Island points to Rushdie’s palimpsest-like condensation of eastern and western references, an “international compendium of myth” (Brennan 74) that creates innume- rable layers of meaning, investing the narrative with a peculiar universality. Although this network of embedded subtexts has infinite resonances, The Conference of the Birds undoubtedly supplies the main model for Flapping Eagle’s journey: Grimus reads like a fictional reworking and refashioning of Attar’s twelfth-century Persian poem which re- lates the ascension of thirty birds towards mystical unity and annihilation on the Moun- tain of Qâf, the seat of the Sovereign Bird. In Attar’s allegory, a large flock of birds, symbolizing human souls, have set their hearts on attending the mysterious court of the Simurg, the king of birds embodying God or Reality, and embracing all plurality.7 They have gathered under the banner of their leader, the Hoopoe, who has undertaken to guide them through the vales and wildernesses of the Mountain. The journey, however, is long, and the path is rugged: thus it is that thousands of birds lag behind or find a grave in the valleys. Out of millions of birds, only thirty survive and reach the Simurg’s science fiction is […] not in its usual guise. Eric S. Rabkin observes: ‘a good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates the whole narrative world from that difference.’ In Grimus, however, there are several areas of difference. Time is arrested. There is life in different dimensions” (Goonetilleke 14). 4. As many critics have noted, Grimus shares the outstanding features of the Menippean satire – notably its commin- gling of jarring genres, “presented at various distances from the ultimate authorial position, that is, with varying degrees of parodying and objectification” (Bakhtin 118) and its propensity to digress gratuitously into pornographic situations. 5. “[…] I’m afraid we bastardize the name to Calf ” (211). This name is homonymous with Attar’s Mountain of Qâf. Rushdie’s unique note in the novel revolves around the author’s inaccurate rendering of the Arabic letter referred to as “K”: “I have chosen to refer to it as K (Kâf) and risk confusion with the quite distinct letter Kaf…” (209). This erroneous spelling is compounded by the fact that Rushdie has anglicized the letter and transformed it into “Calf ”, a scarcely recognizable travesty of the original letter! Rushdie thus asserts the prevalence of the signifier over the signified, exploring language’s potential for confusion. 6. Thus, in Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie underlines the richness and productiveness of bastardization: “[The Satanic Verses] rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. […] It is a love-song to our mongrel selves” (394). 7. Attar did not invent the Simurg. Ferdowsi, the great eleventh-century Persian poet, had convoked it in his Book of Kings, inscribing the royal bird in a double tradition at one and the same time, the heroic epic and the mystical one. 83 “Bastardizing” The Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus court. At the end of Attar’s poem, the birds see their own images reflected as though in a clear mirror and, in a flash of insight, they realize that the external entity they were searching for had always been within them, though dormant, and that to find God they had to discover themselves.8 Little of what happens in Grimus is intelligible without a recognition of this crucial hypotext. That The Conference of the Birds provided the model for Grimus is implied by the very title of the novel, an anagram for the Simurg. Rushdie’s debt to the Persian poet is barely veiled, for the novel incorporates the key to decipher the title and supplies the Western reader who is unfamiliar with the significance of the mythical bird with more information, as Grimus makes a direct, hermeneutic reference to The Conference of the Birds: There is a Sufi poem in which thirty birds set out to find the Simurg on the mountain where he lives.
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