Mister Multiplicity
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing MISTER MULTIPLICITY By Brooke Allen The story of the lyre-player Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice, whose death lured him to the underworld in an attempt to recover her, has...
...Popular writers of the moment are named Zuckerman, Yossarian, Herzog, and Sal Paradise...
...At one point, for instance, he has Rai deliver a little lecture on his reasons for writing about Vina: "We all looked to her for peace, yet she herself was not at peace...
...But when Rushdie frosts the cake with layer upon layer of myth— as he does most of the time—he renders the whole exercise pointless...
...All this is mixed up with lots of earthquake imagery and intimations of Armageddon...
...Rushdie, however, is always more interested in his metaphors than in his people...
...Eurydice combined with Cinderella, with Helen of Troy, with Persephone—that means nothing at all...
...The problem is, it simply can't be done...
...On the day of their birth, his father accidentally injures an older brother (known as Virus), making him mute for life...
...Ormus vows that he won't touch Vina until her 16th birthday...
...A novel, to be the "big" work he has always aspired to write, must have not only ideas but also emotion and geometry if all the smart touches are to mean anything...
...The only real theme of the novel (and in this case the medium really was the message) was that multiplicity— racial, cultural and by extension artistic—is a good thing...
...These words sound singularly unconvincing coming from a laconic high school dropout who purposely rejected the intellectual pursuits of his failed, pathetic father...
...There is a lot of play, too, with the fact that the world of the novel is very slightly different from the world we ourselves know...
...Rushdie's Orpheus is Ormus Cama, a supernaturally gifted musician and composer whose meteoric career takes him from Bombay to London to New York...
...So I stand at the gate of the inferno of language, there's a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a coin under my tongue for the fare...
...Carly Simon sings "Bridge over Troubled Water," and Lou Reed is a woman...
...But details, however scintillating, are only as good as the whole they add up to...
...Do all these mythical parallels give purpose and depth to the story...
...A more recent example is Inman, the Odysseus of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain...
...It has been lavishly praised throughout his career...
...Eurydice means something...
...Rushdie is merely spreading and shaking his gaudy peacock's tail...
...Multiplicity himself...
...And the author is jumping into an old debate on the nature and function of the novel that goes back to the famous quarrel between Henry James and H. G. Wells...
...Early on the author has a lot of fun with the eccentric and oh-so-emblematic parents of Ormus and of Rai...
...At age 44 Vina is swallowed up in a Mexican earthquake...
...negative or even indifferent reviews of his work are few and far between...
...Writers & Writing MISTER MULTIPLICITY By Brooke Allen The story of the lyre-player Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice, whose death lured him to the underworld in an attempt to recover her, has retained surprising power through the millennia...
...I have chosen to tell our story, hers and mine and Ormus Cama's, all of it, every last detail, and then maybe she can find a sort of peace here, on the page, in this underworld of ink and lies, that respite which was denied her by life...
...Aside from its sheer rhetorical baloney (the inferno of language, indeed...
...All of this is echt Rushdie...
...On that magical evening, they enjoy one night of love, then Vina, thanks to a silly plot machination, runs away and they don't see one another for the next 10 years...
...His twin brother, Gayomart, is stillborn...
...Rushdie's own, of course...
...isn't this the sort of thing that should be left for the reader to find, or not to find, for himself...
...Ormus fails to retrieve her, but she eventually returns long enough to attract him back to the underworld...
...They fall in love, a love, as Rai assures us, that is more than the mere mortal variety...
...Ormus makes his way to England and becomes a musician...
...she has many other lovers, most notably Rai himself...
...Get it...
...It's clear that Rushdie is enjoying himself, but what exactly is the point...
...Again, Ormus speaks directly for his author...
...This is it...
...As for the people, are we supposed to respond to Ormus, Vina and Rai as characters, or as archetypes...
...But that is all it was...
...Art is more than love or is it...
...I need it to show that I don't have to be this guy or that guy, the fellow from over there or the fellow from over here, the person within me that I call my twin, or whoever's out there in whatever it is I get flashes of beyond the sky...
...It is jam-packed with myth, metaphor and allusion...
...Now Salman Rushdie has fashioned a contemporary rock version of the tale in his newest novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet...
...Leopold Bloom was one...
...It is as if he is afraid to let his story make its impact in the oblique, insidious way that fiction must...
...The Ground Beneath Her Feet is equally full of what might be called encyclopedic exuberance—or show-offy overkill, depending on how you respond to Rushdie's particular brand of excess...
...Meaning is technical...
...The answer, unfortunately, is that they don't...
...Injured, he lapses into a coma for three and a quarter years and is ultimately awakened by Vina's kiss...
...It is certainly possible to create a real character who is also a mythical archetype...
...Finally they marry, but Vina will never be faithful...
...About midway through his ascent to superstardom, Ormus begins to understand the nature of his talent, and is able to articulate his thoughts to the novel's narrator, a childhood friend and his rival for Vina's love...
...It is his grandiose ambition to encompass all of life, and all of myth, in his fiction...
...Whose artistic philosophy are we really talking about here...
...This is the subject...
...He assumes no subtlety or wisdom on the part of the reader, no intrinsic power of the story...
...A narrative can only support so much in the way of mythical and metaphorical freight...
...This is a notion few of Rushdie's readers would be inclined to disagree with...
...So is heart...
...The two vow, for some cooked-up reason, 10 more years of abstinence...
...Rushdie's previous effort, The Moor's Last Sigh, fell short of that standard...
...The solutions to the problems of art are always technical...
...To put it in architectural terms, the integrity of a building depends on structure, not ornament...
...or just the man standing in front of you right now...
...Eurydice is an Indian-Greek-American rebel named Vina Apsara, a luscious, raunchy, in-your-face performer with the voice of an angel or, rather, of Love itself...
...He himself will tell us what is significant, and why...
...Fawning critics greeted the novel with phrases like "a joyful celebration of diversity," and it was unarguably that...
...This is what Ormus tells Rai: "What I want the music to say is that I don't have to choose...
...Rushdie is taking, in fact extending, Wells' position...
...Cyrus, Virus' twin, associates Ormus with the accident, and his hatred leads him to become a mass-murderer, known to the world as the Pillowman...
...That's where it came from the idea of playing all the instruments...
...In Rushdie's version of history the assassination attempt in Dallas, for example, fails (though another would succeed several years later), and England, like America, is fatally entangled in Indochina...
...One of the novel's conceits is that Rai, skeptical and unmystical, is slowly persuaded that in Ormus and Vina he has known the divine...
...For despite its thousands of rococo flourishes and rhetorical feints, there was no emotional truth to The Moor's Last Sigh, nor any character who added up to more than a mouthpiece for its author...
...Henry James, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf performed this feat, to name only a few...
...Rushdie himself is too impatient for such fine, close work...
...the well-known credo of Mr...
...Like MOST OF Rushdie's novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet bristles with subplots and minor characters...
...Not only Orpheus and Eurydice, but Cinderella, Dionysus, Helen of Troy, Mowgli, Proteus, Cassandra, Cronus, Pinocchio, Lorelei, Jason, Medea, the Indian deities Kama and Rati, and many, many others have their fictional counterparts in the novel...
...The novel is at its strongest when, especially toward the end, it adheres most closely to the simplicity of the Orpheus story...
...Nothing" and "everything" are not straightforward terms, and some writers who specialize in "almost nothing"—Rushdie's image of the silver hair is a good one—manage, through the alchemy of art, to make it seem like almost everything...
...Even Rushdie doesn't seem to know...
...and lest a single one of these escape the reader, he intrudes into the narrative to hammer in his point: "Death is more than love or is it...
...Love is more than death and art, or not...
...True, Rushdie is dazzlingly clever, and I do not use the term in a pejorative sense...
...You were wrong when you said the problem wasn't technical...
...Ormus belongs to a well-off family of Bombay Parsis...
...During this period they become rock music immortals...
...This is the subject...
...Things pick up for the reader after the teenaged Ormus meets 12-year-old Vina, a waif who has already been rejected by three families...
...And so I've chosen to write here, publicly, what I can no longer whisper into her private ear: that is, everything...
...When the author piles it on as indiscriminately as Rushdie does, all meaning vanishes...
...Here comes everybody, right...
...I'll be all of them, I can do that...
...Ormus, according to Rai, "used to say that music could be either about almost nothing, one tiny strand of sound plucked like a silver hair from the head of the Muse, or about everything there was, all of it, tutti tutti, life, marriage, otherworlds, earthquakes, uncertainties, warning, rebukes, journeys, dreams, love, the whole ball of wax, the full nine yards, the whole catastrophe...
...The work positively wallowed in its showy technique, and for all the multifarious, voluble people who inhabited its pages there was only one actual voice in it, and that was Rushdie's own...
...The Orpheus/Eurydice situation is thus reversed and turned into that of Kama and Rati, with a little Sleeping Beauty thrown in...
...The esthetic of plurality became the novel's raison d'être, subsuming everything in its path...
...It was to prove that point...
...The issue, it goes without saying, is not as simple as Ormus/Rushdie would have us believe...
Vol. 82 • May 1999 • No. 6
