Introduction
In the introduction to his 1991 volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie mentions his first published novel, "Grimus, which to put it mildly, bombed" (1). Not only was the book denied the critical acclaim and commercial success its author might have hoped for, but it has also been largely ignored by postcolonial critics, which is most unusual for a novel by this author.
Synopsis
Grimus is a "futuristic fantasy" (Amanuddin 42) about an immortal Native American called Flapping Eagle, whose quest it is to find his sister Bird-Dog and vanquish the arch-villain Grimus, ruler of Calf Island, which is "not quite" in the Mediterranean (Grimus 14). Flapping Eagle and Bird-Dog belong to the fictitious Axona Amerindians, who live in complete isolation near a town called Phoenix (which, incidentally has very little to do with its Arizonian counterpart). Due to Flapping Eagle's posthumous birth, the siblings are virtual outcasts, which is why they have little difficulty in leaving their people when they are offered immortality. Flapping Eagle hesitates for a while and loses track of his sister, for whom he then searches for seven centuries. An old acquaintance enables him to travel to another dimension and reach Calf Island, where he meets gravedigger-cum-guide Virgil Jones. Virgil helps him in his difficult ascent of Calf Mountain, at whose summit Flapping Eagle wants to challenge his antagonist and doppelgonger, Grimus.
In the middle section of the novel, Flapping Eagle abandons his companion and attempts to settle down in the town of K (whose name is the Latin equivalent to the Arabic letter Qaf/K (hence "Calf Island"), where he wreaks havoc on its population by depriving some inhabitants of the absolute certainty that is necessary to fight off the "Dimension-fever" caused by Grimus. After this interlude, Flapping Eagle finishes his quest by overcoming Grimus and destroying the mysterious "Stone Rose" which Grimus had used to hold the place under his spell. Following that event, the island itself is utterly destroyed.
Grimus and Postcolonialism
The novel contains references to numerous works of literature such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Farid-Ud-Din Attar's 12th-century Sufi poem "The Conference of the Birds," Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Hamlet, The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe and The Edda as well as to writers like Coleridge, Keats, and Samuel Beckett, to name but a few. There are parallels to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain --the protagonist, the discussion of time, the self-obsessed community of people from different nations, and the affair with a Russian woman. In addition to these allusions, Grimus also contains "tentative steps towards an examination of post-coloniality (Cundy, "Rehearsing Voices" 129). However, Rushdie touches topics such as hybridity, nationhood, immigration, imperialism, exile and so forth only in passing and at no time is their treatment anywhere as profound as in his later work. "Flapping Eagle," Cundy writes, "is at one and the same time the hero of a nascent and tentative study of migrant identity, and a chaotic fantasy with no immediately discernible arguments of any import" ("Rehearsing Voices" 131). Syed criticises the book for its "failure to countenance postcolonial concerns." (Syed 148).
Conclusion
Apart from the "flimsy" treatment of postcolonial issues (Cundy, "Rehearsing Voices" 134), Grimus has been criticised for its "often tedious mimicry of other writers" (Cundy, Salman Rushdie 12), its generic insecurity between science-fiction and fantasy, its misogyny--"I didn't blame the ladies, dear sweet bebummed betitted things." (Grimus 212)--and particularly for its adolescent puns: "The people, like the names, the events and encounters, are carried to irrational and immoderate extremes which only a very youthful sensibility could enjoy or even envisage" (Walsh 120). Indeed, the glaringly suggestive names, at times reminiscent of classic Star Trek, might lead one to regard Grimus not so much as postcolonial literature but rather as part of the Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett tradition of science fiction/fantasy writing. The problem with this novel is that science fiction is usually a fundamentally rational genre. In Grimus it seems as if "anything goes," which makes the story seem arbitrary (Cundy, "Rehearsing Voices" 136).
At times we get a glimpse of the more mature Rushdie of his later, superior works --"Grimus is in many ways an early manifesto of Rushdie's heterodoxical themes and innovative techniques" (Syed 135).
Structural and stylistic similarities might lead one to wonder whether the book Rushdie really had in mind when tearing apart Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum was actually Grimus: "It is humourless, devoid of characterization, entirely free of a anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts. Reader: I hated it" (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 270).
Works Cited
Amanuddin, Syed. "The Novels of Salman Rushdie: Mediated Reality as
Fantasy." World Literature Today 63:1 (1989): 42-45.
Cundy, Catherine. "'Rehearsing Voices': Salman Rushdie's Grimus". Ariel
27:1 (1992): 128-38.
Cundy, Catherine. Salman Rushdie. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.
Hume, Kathryn. "Taking a Stand while Lacking a Center: Rushdie's Postmodern Politics." Philological Quarterly 74:2 (1995): 209-30.
Rushdie, Salman. Grimus. London: Vintage, 1996.
--. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta/Penguin, 1991.
Syed, Mujeebuddin. "Warped Mythologies: Salman Rushdie's Grimus." Ariel 25:4 (1994): 135-52.
Walsh, William. Indian Literature in English. Harlow: Longman, 1990.
Related Sites
Author: Hans-Georg Erney, Fall 1998
Links
within this site
Introduction Authors Theorists Terms
& Issues