Getting a Rush from Rushdie

          I just read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Tristram Shandy meets Nabokov’s Ada meets Proust meets Gabriel García Márquez meets The Thousand Nights and a Night in Rushdie’s break-out novel, published in 1981, set in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with the background of the first turbulent thirty years of freedom from the British raj, featuring hundreds of children born during the first hour of independence starting at midnight on August 15, 1947, all having superpowers. Telepathy is the power of the narrator, Saleem Sinai, who assembles the others in a telepathic conference that can never agree on anything because it represents, like modern India itself, too many languages, ethnic groups, religions, geographic regions, and points of view.

            Saleem is only thirty-one when he feels himself disintegrating and decides to tell his autobiography to his fiancée Padma Mangroli. She becomes, like the reader whom Tristram Shandy has dialogues with, the voice that urges him to get on with it.

But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next. “At this rate,” Padma complains, “you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.”

Actually it’s only a hundred and fifty pages until Saleem describes his birth, but first he tells of the courting of his grandmother by his grandfather and the story of their children and their children’s marriages. And Saleem likes to give hints of what will happen further along in the story, and to tell his tale as stories linked to other stories or nested within other stories, in the manner of the Arabian Nights. Saleem’s life is not, like Tristram’s bedeviled by his father’s odd philosophical notions, but is tied up with the history of modern India, with which he is coeval. He even has a letter addressed to Baby Saleem from Jawaharlal Nehru, telling him the he mirrors his country’s beginnings.

            Like the narrator of Nabokov’s Ada, Salem has a lifelong passion for his sister, who is at first given the nickname of the Brass Monkey and later becomes Jumila Singer, the voice of Pakistan and of Islam. But this love is never consummated, and in any case, as Saleem and his family learn when he is ten years old, she is not his sister; he was switched at birth with another newborn, another of Midnight’s Children who becomes his bête noir and is portentously named Shiva, recalling the god Shiva the Destroyer.

            The book is about memory, and Saleem admits at times that he may be misremembering and be an unreliable narrator. For him the stimulus of memory is not a finger cake dipped in tea but green chutney, “green as grasshoppers,” and it is the literal chutney made by the woman who switched the babies at birth as well as the figurative chutney of memory that brings Saleem’s narrative together at the end of the book, but not before we have been from Bombay to Pakistan to the jungle Sundarbans of Bangladesh, through the war of 1965 that Saleem insists was begun expressly to destroy his family (and does), and the infamous slum clearance, displacement of tens of thousands, and forced sterilizations of the rule of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay. 

           

Nobody But Nobody Can Translate Pushkin!

My experience with Pushkin is limited to two of his works, The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovitch Belkin (1831), in prose, and his famous novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1833). My old friend Pat Kent, who was a Russian scholar, used to quote a Russian friend of his saying, and you must imagine a thick accent, “Nobody but nobody can translate Pushkin!” This was in reference to the verse novel, and indeed one of the most famous literary friendships came to an end over the translation of the book. Vladimir Nabokov thought he could translate Pushkin and Edmund Wilson thought he could critique the translation, and the result was years of squabble and alienation.

            I think Pushkin’s prose must be easier to turn into English. Gillon Aitken translated my copy of The Tales of Belkin. Pushkin considered these five stories experimental, and for some reason did not wish to publish them under his own name. Hence the pretense that he is really the editor (he signs the “editorial” preface with his own initials) who has undertaken to publish these manuscripts of stories connected with each other only by the claim that they have all been told to Belkin, who has recorded them. The “editor” prefixes a pompous letter from a neighbor about Belkin; it tells us nothing. So the stories are kept at several pseudoeditorial removes. Supposedly Belkin hears them from people indirectly involved, as in the case of “The Shot,” though the apparatus is dropped in the third tale, where the narrator speaks to us directly as “deviating…from the normal practice of modern novelists” in his descriptions. The framing maneuvers Pushkin may have adopted because he liked them in Sir Walter Scott—whom he mentions in the third tale.

            The first two tales are bizarrely unlikely. In the first, “The Shot,” the narrator sees his officer friend, Silvio, whom he knows to be a deadly shot, ignore an insult and eschew a duel, and he asks for an explanation. Silvio says he is waiting to fulfill a threat. He refrained from firing at a Count who had insulted him when the Count did not care enough about the outcome of the duel, and Silvio is saving that unfired shot until it really matters to his dueling opponent, and refraining from endangering his own life in the meantime. The narrator loses touch with Silvio, but later learns directly from the Count that Silvio found him shortly after the Count’s marriage and told him he would now take the shot, but allows the Count one first. The Count’s shot misses, and Silvio fires his shot to hit near the bullet hole created by the missed shot, and leaves.

            In “The Blizzard,” the real bridegroom is hopelessly waylaid from his marriage. Somehow another man wanders in and is pressed into the wedding service; the bride is swooning and does not realize it is the wrong bridegroom. Years later, the original bridegroom dead after never having been able to find his bride, the couple who wed by chance that night meet and fall in love.

            “The Coffin-Maker” is more conventional, and a little like Chekhov. The coffin-maker imagines himself insulted by local artisans who invite him to a feast because, when they toast their customers, they look at him and jokingly drink to his as well. He angrily and drunkenly says he’ll only invite his own clientele to his party. They show up the next night, like a comic zombie movie, and give him a fright until he wakes up.

            The fourth tale is sometimes titled “The Postmaster” in translations, but what is meant is a man who keeps, not a post office, but a posting house where horses are available to be rented out. “Station Master” is only a little better.

            In this tale a traveler who sometimes got horses at a rural posting house tells the story of Dunya, who runs away with a Hussar from this very posting house, her father’s, which is filled with pictures of the Prodigal Son story. In a twist on that biblical parable, Dunya eventually returns, not as the poor woman of the streets her father feared she would become, but a rich woman traveling in style with her children. But Dunya is too late to do more than shed some tears on the grave of her father.

            In the fifth tale there is no longer any pretense of people telling Belkin their stories; the narrator speaks directly to the reader often: “If I followed my own wishes, I would here begin…a description….The reader will relieve me of the unnecessary task of describing the dénouement.” The most contrived of the tales in terms of plot, this is also the most charmingly satisfying. It is Romeo and Juliet meets She Stoops to Conquer, with the latter’s comic ending.

            Lisa, the daughter of one of two feuding landowners, wishes to meet Alexei, the son of the other. So as not to appear forward, she disguises herself as a peasant. They fall in love, but he at first sees the match as barred by their differing status. Then the feuding fathers meet by chance, one is thrown from his horse and the other gives assistance, an invitation is accepted. But the reconciliation leads to an agreement between them that their children shall marry, and Alexei will not agree, since he thinks he loves someone else. But all ends happily when he proposes to the peasant girl in a letter and then finds the lady at home reading it when he calls at her father’s house.

            Pushkin is a clear prose stylist with a light and often comic touch. But the work for which he will always be known is in verse. Eugene Onegin is a verse novel in eight chapters or cantos, which were separately published over the years 1823 to 1831, and the first book publication was in 1833. Each canto has approximately fifty stanzas. Pushkin backed away from his initial description of his book as “in the manner of Byron’s Don Juan,” but the stanza form with its frequent feminine rhyme is unmistakable, and so is the comic effect of telling a story this way. The frequent authorial commentary on the action is also comic, but these comic effects overlay a tragic plot.

           Onegin retires to the country in his twenties, worn out with his rakish life in St. Petersburg. He visits the household where his friend Lensky has been accepted by the younger daughter Olga. The older daughter, the innocent, retiring and bookish Tatyana, falls in love with him and writes a letter expressing her love. He lectures her about his time of love being over, her prospects for another, happier love, and so on. Forced by Lensky to go to the house again, he is overly attentive to Olga to make Lensky jealous. It works, Lensky challenges him to a duel and is killed. Years later Onegin meets Tatyana in town, a princess now and superbly poised. He falls in love, writes a letter expressing it, and gets a lecture in his turn.

            But there is more. Pushkin is himself a character in the story, a friend of Onegin, a poet who observes all of this from a distance, commenting on it, on his own Muse, on the change of seasons, on the health of the country versus the dissipation of the city, on the code of honor that traps people like Lensky and Onegin, and on much more.

            The book was Pushkin’s own favorite and is generally considered his best work. Its iambic tetrameter lines are arranged in a distinctive sonnet-length stanza with not only an intricate rhyme scheme but a correspondingly complicated pattern of male and female rhymes. It is the female rhymes which give to the verse its comic and even cynical tone which plays against the romantic feelings aroused in the course of the story and its tragic outcome.

            Despite the fact he did not invent the verse form, Pushkin created something in Eugene Onegin that is original and unique in Russian literature. When you come across a Russian novel that is short, comic, and in verse, you have to cherish it.

           

Do You Find Kafka Funny?

            There are writers who can only be taken seriously by being taken a little less seriously. David Foster Wallace brilliantly recognized this about Kafka. He suggests that the most familiar stories are “radical literalizations” of truths we tend to think of as metaphorical (“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness”): ”The Metamorphosis” (“what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as creepy or gross, or say that he is forced to take shit as part of his job”), “In the Penal Colony” (“expressions like tongue-lashing or tore him a new asshole”), and “A Hunger Artist” (“tropes like starved for attention or love-starved or the double entendre in the term self-denial, or…the etymological root of anorexia …the Greek word for longing”). And John Updike reminds us in his foreword to The Complete Stories that Kafka, reading his stories aloud to his friends, sometimes laughed so hard he could not continue.

            Philip Rahv introduces the Modern Library edition of Selected Short Stories; he makes a lot of the autobiographical elements of father-son conflict in “The Judgment” (an invalid father pronounces a death sentence on his son, which the son then executes on himself) and “The Metamorphosis” and says Kafka’s achievement was his combination of “the recognizable and mysterious, extreme subjectivity of content with forms rigorously objective, a lovingly exact portrayal of the factual world with a dreamlike and magical dissolution of it.” He writes in 1952, before a name was given to magical realism.

            Updike says Kafka’s work is drenched in some features of modern anomie: a sense of anxiety and shame without a specific cause, a feeling that everything is immensely difficult, and an abnormal sensitivity as of exposed nerve endings.

            The Modern Library edition, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, has fifteen stories, including, besides the ones already mentioned, the very short pieces “A Common Confusion” (a nightmarish inability to connect with someone with whom we are trying to meet), “The New Advocate” (Alexander’s Bucephalus is now working in the law courts), “An Old Manuscript” (“the nomads from the North have taken over the narrator’s town) and “A Fratricide.” Aside from “The Metamorphosis” and “The New Advocate,” animals figure in and narrate a number of stories. “The Burrow” is described from the point of view of the burrowing, unnamed animal;  in “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” the mouse narrator is ambivalent about the value of Josephine, the only mouse who has ever been able to sing, to their community; an ape records his progress from apishness to humanness in “A Report to an Academy”; and “Investigations of a Dog” is an epistemological romp in which the dog in question tries to find out about his world, apparently unaware that his food, for instance, comes from humans…unaware, in fact, that there are such things as humans. “The Great Wall of China” was apparently designed by those almost incredibly remote in distance, authority, and time, to have gaps, even though these obviously give entry to those nomads from the North. “A Country Doctor” doesn’t seem able to control much of what happens to his servant girl or his patient. Finally, “The Hunter Gracchus,” though dead, has conversations about his life and death with the Burgomaster of Riva, who has come to visit his bier on board a boat in the harbor.

            In “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (1934) Walter Benjamin makes an observation similar to David Foster Wallace’s about Kafka literalizing metaphors and sayings: “Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that we could almost regard them as enormous parasites.” Benjamin thought that we tend to overinterpret Kafka and thus miss the point, but I am not convinced that he found Kafka funny, as Wallace and Updike do.