Enjoyofying TMLS?

Hey all. A word from the frontlines of this week's reading, I guess: I don't know about you, and I'm only just now into the second hundred pages of The Moor's Last Sigh, but at numerous times during the first hundred pages I found myself thinking that this nearly appears to be Rushdie's tightest, most captivating novel in terms of pure storytelling. It seems positively inspired at times, despite the fact that the vision of India has by this time (1995) darkened for him significantly. I read somewhere that this is the first novel he composed on a computer, so perhaps that explains the even more pronounced linguistic playfulness in this novel. Anyway, it has me thinking about technique. We recently noted our appreciation for the warmth and poignance of that deathbed scene between Chamcha and his father at the end of The Satanic Verses, which made me wonder if, for all its brilliance, Rushdie's writing doesn't often invite or enable this particular kind of emotional enlargement of our selves (which comes from caring deeply about the characters) during the reading process (does that make sense? do you agree?). The rewards he does offer (which are multiple, to be sure) are of a different kind/register.

I've been noticing the comedy so far in The Moor's Last Sigh, particularly in the dialogue -- I'm not sure Rushdie's dialogue would often be singled out, but damn if it isn't often hugely funny and inventive and, despite its 'hyperbolized' strangeness, somehow both real and rhythmically compelling (look at the exchange between Aurora, Vasco, Sunil Dutt, and Nargis on p. 138, for example). I got a kick out of the sex scene between Aurora and Abraham, too ("you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for awhile..." (89)); Rushdie manages to avoid cliche and find freshness (via comedy) in a common task for the fiction writer, while also mining the discomfort we'd all feel in trying to describe our parents having sex!

Regarding last week's discussion of Haroun and Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories," I wonder what some of your "rabbit-hole" reading experiences have been in your life (the reference, of course, is to Alice in Wonderland, but invoking rabbits reminds me of the fact that at this very moment my son is reading Richard Adams's Watership Down, a novel that is literally about rabbits and that was probably, I'm now reminded, one of those magical reading experiences for me when I was young). When was the power of effective "sub-creation," to quote Tolkien, so great that when you finished a book the feeling was more of one from moving from reality to fantasy rather than the other way around? I guess The Lord of the Rings would have been another one for me (and isn't it odd/wonderful to think that the created world of the book can seem more real than the world you return to when you close the book?!).

And then there was Jordan and Kaylen inviting us to find our own answers to Haroun's question of "What's the use of stories that aren't even true?" Would any of you recommend writers/essays/books that in various ways answer that question in smart and persuasive ways? I always think of the cultural critic & essayist Sven Birkerts, who writes about the glories and pleasures of reading in often inspiring ways: for example, in The Gutenberg Elegies: "Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started" (146). Elsewhere, he proposes that "to open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one's life or of one's orientation toward it. The distinction must be recognized, for when we read we not only transplant ourselves to the place of the text, but we modify our natural angle of regard upon all things; we reposition the self in order to see differently.... We are, for the duration of our reading, different, and the difference has more to do with the process than with its temporary object--the book being read. As with meditation, both the pulse rate and the breathing seem to alter; the interior rhythms are modified in untold ways" (88,89). I wonder what kind of repositioning of the self, specifically, Rushdie's fiction allows us ...

Finally, although this one deals with "stories" that are "true," I love the language Jane Hirshfield finds for justifying the importance of reading poetry: "A good poem makes self and world knowable in new ways, brings us into an existence opened, augmented, and altered. Part of its work, then, must also be surprise -- to awaken into a new circumference is to be startled.... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy." That notion of making the "world knowable in new ways" reminds me a bit of the great line in the Tolkien essay when he argues that "we need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity -- from possessiveness" (77). This seems to be an important part of Haroun's epiphany, too, and may be part of the gift we receive from this novel if it's one that works for us.