A DON QUIXOTE FOR OUR TIMES?
Satire skewers modern society, but its quirks feel dated, says Vidyan Ravinthiran.
It’s commonplace to say that satire is out of date. Overtaken by our bonkers politics, it has been made irrelevant by larger-thanlife buffoons who, having arrived at the centres of power, engineer an aura of freewheeling absurdity that surpasses any attempt — in any medium — to lampoon them. But Salman Rushdie doesn’t agree. “It’s more important to have satire in these times,” he said in an interview last year, about his 2017 novel, The Golden House.
His new novel is satire, too, like its archetype, Don Quixote. Ismail Smile, a half-cracked commercial traveller who has suffered a stroke, watches too much television, becomes besotted with the celebrity Salma R (one letter away from “Salman”) and decides — having renamed himself Quichotte — his destiny is to meet and fall in love with her.
“He was a brown man in America longing for a brown woman, but he did not see his story in racial terms.” Longing, too, for the son he never had, he brings into existence a make-believe one, his own Sancho.
The novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, attacks what U.S. (and English, and Indian) politics has become, and speaks compellingly of violence toward minorities, while also mocking both right- and left-wing amnesia: “We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.” But its primary target, as satire, is the sort of simplistic narrative — the TV shows to which Quichotte is addicted, for instance — through which the media filter the world, but a narrative that is inadequate in a global multiculture.
It transpires, in one of Rushdie’s familiar games-withingames, that all these characters are themselves fictions of an author called Sam DuChamp, or Brother, another character with family disorders and deracinated confusions. So there’s more going on than meets the eye. Then, when Sancho appears out of nothing, it becomes clear this is a work of magical realism.
At one point, a newscaster speaks directly to Quichotte. Sancho turns into a real boy thanks to a version of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio. Quichotte and Sancho meet those who have magically turned into mastodons, a clear allegory for “errorism” — Salma hosts a discussion about it on her talk show — which encompasses
“all the enemies of contemporary reality: the anti-vaxxers, the climate loonies, the news paranoiacs, the UFOlogists, the president.”
This is Rushdie preaching to the converted. “Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense. The mastodons refuse to believe that they have turned into horrible, surrealistic mutants, and they become hostile and aggressive, they take their children out of school, and have contempt for education.” Such laments about the decline of rationality throng our fiction at the moment — Ian McEwan is prone to them, too — but what do they accomplish?
Sancho sees people with strange unfastened dog collars around their necks, who beat him up: a metaphor for racists who have come out of the woodwork and off the chain. Magical realism evokes such things without surprise, as if they were routine: Homi Bhabha called it “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world.” Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight’s Children, his 1981 masterpiece that, examining independence for India, moves qualmlessly from the ordinary to the bizarre. Its characters have powers (mind-reading, for example; another eats metal, like an ostrich). They are, in a sense, post-colonial superheroes, an Indian X-Men. Through Rushdie’s tricks, history is activated within the individual life, alternative world-views are juxtaposed and the discontinuities of colonialism are excavated.
The magical realist satire of Quichotte is nervier. The mastodon incident, for instance, is fiction squared (it occurs in the book which Sam, a character within Rushdie’s book, is writing) and so it’s all highly self-conscious and arrives, so to speak, pre-critiqued. Rushdie is worried — as a maker of magical fictions — that fictionality itself has been robbed of value by a politics that embraces outright lies as routes to power. Yet the novel-within-a-novel strategy doesn’t resolve the problem, and a quieter, less grandiose kind of storytelling might now be truer to migrant lives. There’s too much noise, exaggeration and paranoia in the world already.
The best, most piercing moments in the novel occur when dreams recede and analysis is risked. Sancho, demanding his independence, tells his father that means he must have a bank account, for “a debit card is important. An overdraft is important. If you’re not buying stuff, if you’re not making repayments, the system doesn’t recognise (sic) that you exist.” Magical realism aside, there are other ways in the U.S. to become an invisible ghost — to have people look right through you.
This is the Rushdie we still need — the eviscerator of the powersthat-be, who destroys rather than creates illusions. After Sancho is assaulted, and feeling that he has “come loose from the world,” he realizes “this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person — previously peaceable and law-abiding — afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.” Here is a language adequate to our times — which can’t be said for all Rushdie’s ludic doublings, digressions and knowing references.
One doesn’t expect uniqueness from the rewriting of a classic, but I was also struck by an unexamined debt, or accidental overlap, with Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Exit West, in which portals stand in as a trope for migration. Similarly, in Quichotte, Sam invents the cyber-entrepreneur, Evel Cent (originally Awwal
Sant: All Rushdie’s main players are Indians, come loose, like Sancho, from their moorings), who says the world is ending and that only with the aid of his NEXT portals is escape possible, to a parallel dimension. By this point, Quichotte knows Salma — she’s an opioid addict, he works in pharmaceuticals — and they leave this world for a new one, hand in hand like Milton’s Adam and Eve:
“So if we go, we go as refugees,” Quichotte said. “Pilgrims setting foot for the first time upon a new world, hoping the indigenous population will teach us how to survive there.”
“I’m wondering,” Salma said. “If others follow us, will they come as
conquerors?”
The colonial allegory is obvious. Throughout the novel, meanings are underscored like this, as Rushdie grants an element of been-there-done-that to his set pieces and subplots.
But he also insists — as if trying to have it both ways — that his methods are up to date, in fact exactly what is currently required. This isn’t Sam, but the overseeing narrator:
“It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way, that they should be grounded in one place or the other … yet so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have travelled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice. Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world.”
This apologia does not convince. It isn’t that the contemporary novel shouldn’t take the transnational route (perhaps it must), but Quichotte’s “broken families” aren’t representative but exceptional (a wealthy elite) and, when it’s time to tie things up, they’re magically united by plot devices that exclude the frictions of happenstance. The novel mocks Quichotte for his addiction to reductive TV — but Rushdie’s own style is both too noisy and too neat.
Where every detail incandesces, there’s no place for the nondescript; characters chained together by rhyming traumas live lives thronged with incident but purged of the incidental. The magical realist, like the screenwriter, becomes a simplifier. Like one of those errorists, Rushdie’s wealth of confabulation is in the service of a single untruth — he tells us the world is flat.
London Daily Telegraph
Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense. The mastodons refuse to believe that they have turned into horrible, surrealistic mutants. Salman Rushdie, in Quichotte