“Before there were books, there were stories.” The Biblical ring in these opening lines of Salman Rushdie’s new book, Languages of Truth, forms the crux of both the design as well as the dialectics of the book in more ways than one.
Whether the simulation was deliberate or not, the allusions ring loud and clear. The echo of “In the beginning was the word,” the first line of the book of John, clearly establishes Rushdie’s faith in the undeniable connection between the celestial power of the “word” right from its genesis and the magic imminent in words woven together to create “stories”.
He is especially enamoured by stories rendered in the oral form and demonstrates in great detail, again through stories themselves, how storytelling has been captivating, nourishing and shaping human imagination from the beginning of time.
Then comes into play the magnificent design Rushdie borrows from one of the most superlative stories of the Book of Genesis – the incredible story of Noah’s Ark built to survive the Great Flood and preserve the life of all animal species for a fresh start.
Cover design
Books, more often than not, come with a book cover that kind of ushers one into the book! That is a job well done. (Wait! Do not let my supreme wisdom get you hyper.) But when a book cover ceases to just be a “cover,” a tarmac of sorts wherefrom a book can take off, and instead forms the very framework and narrative core of the book inside then it becomes an indispensable part of the book itself.
The cover design of the American edition of Languages of Truth is out of the ordinary, to say the least. It complements the design and content of the narrative inside the book. The cover design by Lucas Heinrich comprises four works of art – a painting, a photograph, an illustration and an installation – undoubtedly curated and strung together by the master storyteller, the “incompetent puppeteer” himself!
The first image is of a painting titled “Hanuman before Rama and Lakshmana”. The royal brothers and the monkey god seem to be in a meeting while in exile in the forest and the atmosphere is one of gloom, heavy with the weight of the impending war with Ravana hinted by the ocean in the distance.
In the context of the book, this image is meant to remind the readers of at least two major events – war and vanvās! And vanvās, exile, not just of the mythological figures but equally importantly of Rushdie himself into the realm of “nowhere” for almost a decade. I think being a “writer in exile” is still a luxury when compared to Rushdie’s fate to have had to just totally “disappear”, to cease to “exist”.
The second image is a photograph of the brilliant Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil who stood her ground and never laid down her weapons in the endless “ideological wars” the world around her plunged her into for being a woman, for having a mind of her own, for being born ahead of her times.
The third is a book illustration of Don Quixote fighting windmills. The last image is of “The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, 2013” an installation by Kara Walker re-enacting an imaginary battle from the Civil War anniversary celebrations held in America in 2011.
Walker uses materials as ordinary as white paper and adhesive to create silhouettes on a black wall. There is no writing on the wall. But the stories embodied in the silhouettes speak of all that is gone wrong with the world in the new millennium – its decadent sex culture, porn culture, gun culture, bomb culture, human-bomb culture, the approbation of Guantanamo culture and above all a robust and thriving war culture.
‘Languages of truth’
Now, what is it that brings these varied forms of art on to the same page? Well, for Rushdie, they are all indisputable sources of storytelling, the ultimate form of art into which all arts finally converge: for this form alone holds the power to lend them expression, lend them meaning, lend them what Rushdie calls the “languages of truth”.
According to Rushdie, “Van Gogh’s painting of a starry night does not look like…what a starry night looks like to the naked eye, but…all who look upon it understand it to be true.” This is the language spoken by art – the language of truth. All four works of art depicted here make extremely powerful and direct allusions to wars: wars of all kinds, shapes and sizes – mythological, intellectual, fictional and real (in that order). In the context of the period in which the essays included in this book were composed, that is, 2003 to 2020, this visual exposition on “war” gains monumental significance and becomes exceptional.
Rushdie’s “2003” could have as well been “2001,” the year of 9/11. Just a year into the new millennium mankind witnessed the “breaking news” of warring planes crashing into skyscrapers. People glued to their television sets across the globe and watched in utter horror and total disbelief the “LIVE” coverage of the real-time apocalyptic scenes that surpassed even the best of Hollywood imagination.
This event revived the vertical divide of the globe afresh and all the friction and hostility associated with the Orient-Occident binary resulting in the outbreak of a pandemic of cultural conflict and xenophobia.
Twenty years into the violence the wars have not really ceased yet. Much of West Asia lies in ruins today. In fact, even as I write this US troops in Afghanistan are returning home and the Taliban we hear are planning their own return, too!
While the year 2001 witnessed real wars on real battlefields the year “2020” witnessed the onset of a war on a much larger scale, a “world war” of sorts, against an invisible enemy, the coronavirus christened Covid-19 by the WHO. The pandemic has so far claimed more than four million lives in less than twenty months.
Therefore, it becomes imperative that we underscore the time frame of Rushdie’s essays. They are firmly sandwiched between two catastrophic events that evoked in all of mankind a sense of the “apocalypse”, the “end of the world”.
World of art
Rushdie’s reaction to this feeling of finality is fierce and is filled with a sense of urgency. His references to “I Am Not Yet Dead” from the astounding musical Monty Python’s Spamalot – wherein the lines “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!…. I’m not dead!…. I feel happy! I feel happy! I am not dead yet,” form the refrain – speak volumes about the urgency.
If the “end” should really be here it becomes binding upon him, as a supreme practitioner of one of the arts himself, to save the “world of art” from perishing with us, mere mortals. He invokes the story of Orpheus to drive home the point that “Art does not [and must not] die when the artist dies.”
Consequently, he takes it upon himself to find, rescue and safeguard the best of arts, artists and their works for future generations, for posterity, for the “new world”. With this prodigious objective in mind Rushdie embarks upon an equally prodigious project – building a “Noah’s Ark” for art. An ark of “essays” titled Languages of Truth that will bring aboard the best of arts, artists and their works and preserve them till the end of time.
At this point, I begin to feel like lucky Jack Dawson, not boarding, but sprinting, screaming and barging into the Titanic (only that it sank!) with excitement. Come on in then, let us see what Rushdie’s Ark has to offer. Those of us who are even faintly familiar with Rushdie’s work know that he is all about “tales” and tales about tales.
So it comes as no surprise that the tour on the Ark begins with wonder tales. Here, Rushdie leaves his readers enchanted and delirious with the story of the story. In a matter of a few page-minutes, the reader is rewarded with a magic-carpet tour of a cosmic scale of stories from far and wide, deftly interspersed with details of their beginnings, transformations, variants as well as disappearances almost achieving a historiographic meta-story of the “story”.
The scale of the materials presented stand witness to the magnitude of research conducted. Page after page, Rushdie constantly evokes in the reader his/her own memories of the stories and their storytellers. I personally was reminded of the excitement of the endless “and thens” I goaded my father with during bedtime stories.
I still remember saying “and then” after the washerman had thrashed the donkey while the dog slept away and poor thing he went on to add “well he had to then take the donkey to the doctor and then… and then…” till I fell asleep.
My father was a well-read man and never let go the slightest occasion to make me understand the value of books and the stories they carried. All he ever gifted me was books; never ever gold! I soon learned to love books in their completeness, their wholeness, the physicality of their being as much as the soul they carried within.
My favourite childhood experience with books remains the inexpressible delight I took in the colourful spread of books on display at Higginbotham’s at major connecting train stations in the 80s and 90s. And this is exactly what Rushdie chooses to evoke in us – memories of stories and stories of stories.
Story of the story
Rushdie leaves no “story” unturned to underscore the priceless value of the art of storytelling. No story is left out. No storyteller is left out. From Homer to Valmiki to Vyasa to The Arabian Nights to Aesop’s Fables to Panchatantra to Katha Sarit Sagara to Amar Chitra Katha to Disney World characters – stories and storytellers from the very beginning of time are chronicled, celebrated and accorded the status of immortality.
In fact, in the hands of this master storyteller, the “story of the story” sheds its research write-up traits and transfigures itself into a story complete with elements of surprise, suspense, intrigue and “and then whats”. Imagine being told that The Arabian Nights did not originate in the Arab world! Yes. Such dainty bits of information keep twinkling across the pages of the book and stun the reader like fireflies on a bluey dewy night.
For Rushdie artists rank highest among all beings of the world. In fact, every region across the face of the earth, every nation, city, home, or even a lane or what we call chawl in India, is known first and foremost for their artists and their art. And he takes pride in establishing the validity of this argument. Ancient Greece is Homer, he writes, and Renaissance Italy Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci…just to mention a few “first citizens” of the world by that virtue.
And all artists are storytellers. So paintings become stories and stories, paintings! In other words, artists influence one another and they must. I did not know MF Hussain’s “horses” had galloped out of Picasso’s Guernica until I read this book. Rushdie’s own Midnight’s Children is such a stellar mix of artistic influences. And I have no qualms whatsoever in calling it the best work of fiction, ever. Yes. Ever.
What about James Joyce’s Ulysses, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum whose influence in making and shaping Rushdie’s work remains indispensable, which he himself acknowledges time and again, you ask! Well, good seeds bear good fruit and…better seeds bear better fruit! Hahaha!
Yes. And this comes from Rushdie’s fondness for the idea of metamorphosis. He delineates metamorphosis as the very core of life. Because it is the metamorphosis that makes and has made stories possible: from Greek mythology to Indian mythology and beyond. For him the best of art is that which is “protean” – art that is “metamorphic” and not “concealing but…revelatory”.
This is exactly why he says he prefers the “polytheistic pantheons”. The characters therein lend themselves to endless metamorphosis and complex portrayals – the basis for art that is enduring and everlasting.
This explains why Rushdie celebrates “migration” – his own as well as that of art. Unlike most migrant/diaspora writers he makes no sob-story of his “migrant” status. Nor does he yearn to “arrive” because such arrivals, according to him, are simply not possible. Instead, he revels in the “creative benefits of displacement”.
“Migration,” he insists, is a primary requisite to both, narrative and the narrator, story and the storyteller, art and the artist. The autobiographical elements woven into the “stories” across the book render the personal and literary journeys – including his own “Papa kehte hain bada naam karega” moments as a young man – of the migrant-Rushdie more endearing and engaging than ever before. For instance, the sense of respect, appreciation and astonishment he expresses for the “transatlantic cables” leaves us in complete awe of this great writer.
According to Rushdie we now live “at a hinge moment in history…a moment when dark storm clouds rush across the sun, and when there are plagues and dragons loose in the world…all must be remade…rethought, reimagined and rewritten [so as not to] fail…in the pursuit of art”. And to achieve this even “our dead bodies” may be required to be “pressed into service”.
No wonder in The Proust Questionnaire he includes at the end of the book he reveals his greatest extravagance to be “linguistic” whose favourite heroes of fiction are Leopold Bloom and Gregor Samsa! And if he were to be reborn he would still prefer to sit on the shelf (as a writer) (than hang on the wall as a painter, I guess)!
Languages of Truth is Salman Rushdie’s much-awaited treatise on art, a self-portrait of the artist as a septuagenarian as well as a mini-encyclopaedia of the arts – all at the same time. Meanwhile, on his Ark, Marilyn Monroe sings in a transparent golden gown and Shakespeare watches her from the bar dressed in an open jacket and sipping ale! Make haste, ’cause there is a whole encyclopaedia of artists and their works and the characters therein for us to sight-see with Sir Salman Rushdie himself at the wheel.
If you are a student of literature, or of any of the other arts, or of life itself you must most certainly have a copy of the enchanting Languages of Truth among your collectables. And try not to complain if you do not like a page or two. Remember, even the best of banquet meals must come with their excesses!
This article first appeared in The Punch Magazine.