• 1 Many critics have expressed doubts about Grimus. Catherine Cundy rates it poorly in comparison to R (...)
• 2 “As a writer, my worst mistake was my first novel. My first novel, Grimus – the one, mercifully, no (...)
• 3 The author submitted his manuscript of Grimus to a science fiction writing contest. Many critics ha (...)
• 4 As many critics have noted, Grimus shares the outstanding features of the Menippean satire – notabl (...)
• 5 “[…] I’m afraid we bastardize the name to Calf” (211). This name is homonymous with Attar’s Mountai (...)
• 6 Thus, in Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie underlines the richness and productiveness of bastardi (...)

1Grimus is Salman Rushdie’s least read novel. It occupies a special place in Rushdie’s opus. Not only is it the author’s first novel, but it also seems to be rather depreciated, as if fated to suffer a peculiar kind of oblivion.1 It was not enthusiastically received when it was first published in 1975, and Rushdie’s own subsequent estimation of the novel was likewise very harsh.2 When compared to later works, it is true that Grimus seems to lack confidence in what it is attempting to be, as if the novel did not dare rely on the power of fiction. Rushdie’s ostentatious display of mastery – reminiscent of a young peacock flaunting its colorful feathers – and his heavy, abstruse pronouncements certainly lack the humor and linguistic exuberance distinctive of his later fiction, and have an unfortunate effect on the novel, stripping it of emotion and preventing any real engagement in the narrative. Grimus is rarely studied on its own terms, either because the novel is viewed solely as a womb in which later concerns of Rushdie’s writing gestate, or because it does not comply with currently fashionable issues and looks suspect, as it were, in terms of its postcolonial credentials. The critics who have delved into Grimus have privileged a polarized, somewhat schematic reading of the text, as is epitomized by Mujeedbuddin Syed’s analysis of the novel which first envisions Grimus as an “early manifesto of Rushdie’s heterodoxical themes and innovative techniques” only to end up chastizing the novel for giving no indication of the author’s future interests as it fails “to countenance postcolonial concerns” (148). As a matter of fact, it is precisely because the novel resists pigeonholing that this all-encompassing, protean work – torn as it is between its futurist aspects3 and its impudent variation on a poetical, mystical tradition – deserves minute examination. Grimus draws heavily on the carnivalized folklore analyzed by Bakhtin:4 this paper explores the process of bastardization that is the novel’s most crucial dynamic. Whilst the verb “bastardize” appears only once in the novel,5 this phenomenon, which is invested with a highly positive significance in Rushdie’s works,6 as it bespeaks the interpenetration of cultures and inveighs against any cultural or literary paradigm based on purity, operates at a structural level in Grimus. Through a parodic transcontextualization that is foremost an act of translation from the realm of the absolute to the precarious space of the fictional, the author opens up a reinterpretative space, playfully subverting the authority of the canon.

• 7 Attar did not invent the Simurg. Ferdowsi, the great eleventh-century Persian poet, had convoked it (...)
• 8 The whole poem relies on a play on the word Simurg, which expresses the crucial Sufi concept of imm (...)

2Significantly, Grimus is the only novel by Salman Rushdie that originates from another book, with a purely literary beginning, thus ironically questioning the very notion of “conceptualization” ─ which refers to the power of willing something out of nothing ─ on which the novel relies. In fact, the undetermined topography of the novel – an imaginary island situated somewhere in the Mediterranean, straddling the West and the East – reveals Grimus to be a literary experiment, in compliance with the traditional function of islands in literature as experimental laboratories. More than a mere setting, Calf Island points to Rushdie’s palimpsest-like condensation of eastern and western references, an “international compendium of myth” (Brennan 74) that creates innumerable layers of meaning, investing the narrative with a peculiar universality. Although this network of embedded subtexts has infinite resonances, The Conference of the Birds undoubtedly supplies the main model for Flapping Eagle’s journey: Grimus reads like a fictional reworking and refashioning of Attar’s twelfth-century Persian poem which relates the ascension of thirty birds towards mystical unity and annihilation on the Mountain of Qâf, the seat of the Sovereign Bird. In Attar’s allegory, a large flock of birds, symbolizing human souls, have set their hearts on attending the mysterious court of the Simurg, the king of birds embodying God or Reality, and embracing all plurality.7 They have gathered under the banner of their leader, the Hoopoe, who has undertaken to guide them through the vales and wildernesses of the Mountain. The journey, however, is long, and the path is rugged: thus it is that thousands of birds lag behind or find a grave in the valleys. Out of millions of birds, only thirty survive and reach the Simurg’s court. At the end of Attar’s poem, the birds see their own images reflected as though in a clear mirror and, in a flash of insight, they realize that the external entity they were searching for had always been within them, though dormant, and that to find God they had to discover themselves.8 Little of what happens in Grimus is intelligible without a recognition of this crucial hypotext. That The Conference of the Birds provided the model for Grimus is implied by the very title of the novel, an anagram for the Simurg. Rushdie’s debt to the Persian poet is barely veiled, for the novel incorporates the key to decipher the title and supplies the Western reader who is unfamiliar with the significance of the mythical bird with more information, as Grimus makes a direct, hermeneutic reference to The Conference of the Birds:

• 9 In Grimus, the protagonist’s obsession with “home” is conveyed by a metaphor that owes much to The (...)

The author’s interest in Attar’s work thus proves to be a real obsession ─ a term that is emphatically used in Rushdie’s first novel ─ but after all, as Ignatius Gribb declaims in Grimus, “How many geniuses have you heard of who were in no way obsessive?” (160) In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie states: “[…] it is perhaps one of the more pleasant freedoms of the literary migrant to be able to choose his parents” (21). It is by no means coincidental that our fledgling author should inscribe his first novel in the filiation of the Persian poet, as The Conference of the Birds stages the Sufi traveler’s return “home,” a metaphor depicting man’s ultimate immersion in the bosom of deity.9 Since Grimus is a novel which tirelessly comments on its own genesis, the “womb-obsession […], this inquiry into birth” (148) which characterizes it may actually describe Salman Rushdie’s experience as a young writer practicing his notes among the English or, to borrow from the novel, “searching for a suitable voice to speak in” (32).

• 10 Hutcheon stands in sharp contrast to Genette, who is heedless of the pragmatic context of parody (t (...)
• 11 Owing to the two meanings of the prefix para-, which means both “counter, against” and “beside,” pa (...)

3In Grimus, Salman Rushdie’s rewriting of The Conference of the Birds is characterized by a combination of repetition and disparity, respectful homage and utter irreverence. The title of the novel articulates these striking interrelations between same and other, insofar as, although a word and its anagrams contain the same letters, an anagram is also a distortion (Parameswaran 58). In this respect, it is significant that the author should have chosen “Grimus” over other possible permutations of letters (Urgims, Rumgis, Srigum...), as one of the title’s undeniable connotations is “grimace”! Through paronomasia, Rushdie immediately inscribes Grimus in the literary tradition of parody – defined by Linda Hutcheon (who is clearly averse to giving any transhistorical definition of parody and restricting its range of intent)10 as “a modern recoding which establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon 8) – thus marking the beginning of a polyphonic conception of literature.11 This first novel is distinguished by its iconoclastic, pattern-breaking pattern. With Grimus, Rushdie composes a distorted reflection of The Conference of the Birds, magnified by a casual allusion to the misshapen birds which people “Grimushome” at the end of the novel, and indulges in a methodical, flippant undercutting of Attar’s epic poem.

• 12 Significantly, the topography of the novel – “a series of ‘concentric circles’” (83) – is reminisce (...)

4Through a device of “ironic inversion” characteristic of parody (Hutcheon 6), Flapping Eagle’s ascent up the Mountain of Calf thus becomes a sinking into hell.12 The lexical field of failure pervades the novel, as illustrated by the fairly depressing song one of the prostitutes whispers to the sleeping Virgil:

• 13 Kafkaesque nightmare elements – the theme of struggle and helplessness against an unfathomable caus (...)
• 14 The deep, anguished sense of doubt that pervades Grimus makes Salman Rushdie closer to a skeptic li (...)
• 15 Grimus offers striking similarities with Simone de Beauvoir’s Tous les hommes sont mortels, a novel (...)

Here the use of alliterations and violent verbs lays the emphasis on the destruction of the wayfarer by the personified mountain. A Kafkaesque sense of the absurd permeates the quest, creating an impression of gratuitousness,13 confirmed by Flapping Eagle’s weariness: “O hell, he said. I’ll do it anyway. Why not?” (192)14 In Grimus, the quest thus seems to be carried out mechanically, recalling Sisyphus’s punishment, as perpetual ascension is required to reach “Grimushome.” If the transparent topography of the island – whose only item of topographical importance is Calf Mountain – unveils a yearning for evasion and a reversal of man’s Fall, Rushdie strips the island of its potential for plenitude. As evinced by the “overtly phallic” (56) shape of the island, which undercuts the traditional representation of the utopian island as a womb, Grimus is a striking departure from utopia. Indeed, K provides an ironic version of the Island of the Blessed. Though the town is peopled by immortals who have drunk Grimus’s “Elixir of Life,” it is nothing but a “coffin of an island” (The Satanic Verses 146), a hell of unending patterns of thought and behaviour representing the horror of permanence. Immortality – the divine prerogative the Sufi yearns for – appears as a burden, as Flapping Eagle’s strong death urge suggests: “I want to return to the human race” (55).15 Whereas the Sufi views death as a spiritual event, Flapping Eagle only longs for biological extinction. Rushdie thus subverts the ultimate goal of the quest in Attar’s allegory, remorselessly degrading its spiritual purport.

• 16 The character’s pliability anticipates Isky’s cobra-like transformation from flamboyant playboy to (...)

5A parody of Attar’s bird-pilgrim, Flapping Eagle enters an ontological void when he professes to neither own nor lack all qualities, as well as an epistemological void in which all claims for meaning disappear. His fundamental hollowness and malleability are recurrently stressed. In “A Shell without a Form,” (192) the protagonist thus adopts various guises, mimicking the transforming qualities of the eagle in the Avesta and other Zoroastrian books.16 In fact, according to these sources, the eagle is endowed with divine, miraculous powers: the mere burning of one of its feathers is believed to cause its immediate appearance to cure the most deadly of maladies instantly. Far from being blessed with curative powers, the protagonist ─ ironically nicknamed “Born-From-Dead” ─ is doomed to be a “murderous eagle” (179). The curse that plagues him is strikingly expressed by the god Axona through the juxtaposition of terse, anaphoric prophecies: “Whatsoever you touch, is soiled; whatsoever you grasp, you break; any person you love is stifled by your love; any person you hate is purified by your loathing” (87). Flapping Eagle, the pilgrim bird in search of the Simurg, is therefore clearly presented as an anti-hero. Although he is depicted from the outset as a deviant ─ he is too white for the (fictitious) Amerindian tribe of the Axona and different from them by the manner of his birth ─ thus representing a minority man, there is nothing about him to suggest any fundamental difference from the figures of oppression that appear in the novel. His remarkable commonness is epitomized by the first description that the reader is given of him:

• 17 In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an interesting play on the literal and the figurative meanings is (...)

8In fact, Rushdie’s parodic reworking of The Conference of the Birds literalizes the main features of the crucial Sufi concept of union with God. In Attar’s poem, the birds’ ecstatic union with the Simurg is likened to the experience of love, as shown from the outset by the hoopoe’s injunctions: “For your beloved, renounce this dear life of yours, as worthy men. If you submit with grace, the beloved will give his life for you” (The Conference of the Birds 13). In Grimus, the metaphor of love is literalised in Flapping Eagle’s physical “unions” with Irina and Elfrida. While The Conference of the Birds undermines carnal love – “Sensual love is a game. Love which is inspired by passing beauty is itself fleeting” (64) – Grimus replaces mystical fusion with sexual intercourse. As Flapping Eagle reflects on the nature of his relationships with Irina and Elfrida, he likens the two women to “moths to his candle,” (147) implicitly identifying himself with the Simurg. The metaphor is elaborated on by Attar to depict man’s irresistible attraction to God: “We are like the moth who wished for union with the flame of the candle. They told him not to sacrifice himself so foolishly and for such an impossible aim, but he […] told them that since his heart was given to the flame forever, nothing else mattered” (131). More explicitly, the protagonist describes himself as the one through whom wholeness is reached: “In themselves, neither was complete; through him, they both attained completion” (172). The adjective “complete” is stressed by the use of the polyptoton “completion,” foreshadowing Grimus’s creed: “That which is complete is also dead” (225), and thus tightly bounding up union with annihilation. This is confirmed further in the text, as Flapping Eagle unwittingly calls Irina by another name, marring their romance: “The moment of perfection had spawned its own destruction” (172). Naturally, such a statement foreshadows the very end of the novel, in which Calf Mountain dissolves as Flapping Eagle and Media make love. In compliance with The Conference of the Birds, union and annihilation are therefore closely linked, although Sufi fusion is transposed from the spiritual to the material realm. In the light of such mock mystical unions, the description of the protagonist’s merging with Grimus also appears as a literalization of the Sufi metaphor of love. Indeed, sexual ecstasy is unequivocally conveyed by the following passage: