History - Salman Rushdie's Newest - Puritanism, Reconsidered

 I should have been a historian, much of the disappointments of my life might have been then avoided. Instead, having broken with the life that actually was, it is just a fuel for my fictions.

William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom gives one way of the novelist handling fiction. Gore Vidal has another. Salman Rushdie has another in his new novel, Victory City

Ankhi Mukherjee's review of Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City” on Public Books discusses Rushdie's use of history.

History, Rushdie says in the opening page of the novel, tends to be ruined by “the passage of time, the imperfections of memory, and the falsehoods of those who came after.” He offers in its stead the narrative poem written by Pampa Kampana. Rushdie’s oeuvre is redolent of furies and female demigods unceremoniously erased from history: Sufiya Zenobia in Shame, rendered as “a rumour, a chimera, the collective fantasy of a stifled people”; the goddesses Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat in Satanic Verses, once believed to be the daughters of Allah, but eventually denounced as false idols. Pampa Kampana, hapless recipient of the celestial boon (“you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story”), is both of her time and ageless, undead for hundreds of years yet doomed to perpetuating her legacy like ordinary mortals by begetting children (who will all die before her). Her life, like the textual corpus of Jayaparajaya, is nothing but a long tale: “[S]he felt like a means to an end … an unbreakable container into which history was being shoveled.”

Gore Vidal often wrote of American historical amnesia. We see it stamped on every MAGA hat. We hear it in everyone decrying critical race theory. Absalom Absalom also dealt with the creation of history, without making the open declaration of what constitutes our history can be made out of falsehoods. I want to play with this idea myself. We all should be thinking of the history we are dealt with.

 And Puritanism is a major component of American history, and American literature - just read Nathaniel Hawthorne. More currently, I read recently Puritanism, Old and New: In Conversation with Marly Youmans on her New Novel from The Kenyon Review:

AM: The May 1690 opening of the novel, “Sup Sorrow,” foregrounds a horrific attack inflicted on English settlers from an English perspective. Increasingly, such settlers are being regarded, in universities and in popular culture, as racial supremacists dispossessing indigenous peoples. Did you feel any pressure or tension in your storytelling to accommodate the changed (and changing) attitude of Americans toward this phase of our collective history?

MY: If I were to make a novel in which, say, a current English professor at Sarah Lawrence or Oberlin or some other elite private college proceeded to recount Charis’s story, I could hardly avoid writing about “racial supremacists dispossessing indigenous people.” But she is not of our time. Charis has complicated feelings about the colony and the tribes with their various alliances, but I don’t wish to write a book with characters who wear old-fashioned dress but reveal new-fashioned minds. Where is the truth in such stories? Instead, I aim to leap into the place, the time, and the mental world of my characters. To fail to do so is to fail the craft we practice.

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AM: In the time and place in which the novel takes place, religion had an intense emphasis on sin, Satan, and fallenness–an obsession, at the societal level and the individual level as well, which plays into the fate of Phoebe Wardwell (I’ll leave it at that to avoid any spoilers) and into Charis’s own fate. What are your thoughts on the role of sin and evil in the novel? Do you agree that Satan has undergone a relative deemphasis in contemporary faith?

MY: We tend to think of Puritan belief as monolithic—some big basalt Puritan statue of a man with a goofy giant buckle on its hat—but Puritan thought varied. Massachusetts Bay was harder, harsher than England, as was its depiction of Christian faith. But ministers were not stamped-out coins, not identical in their understanding, or in their education and reading of sacred texts. One of the challenging things about writing the novel was the juggling of multiple views on issues of sin and evil: Charis’s questions; Francis Dane’s more humane version of Puritan thought, more congenial with how the godly appeared at the time in England; and the stricter version that appears here and there through Thomas Barnard and references to others. Lizzie and Mehitabel make use of folk fortune-telling, as was not uncommon among the colonists, though condemned as sinful in Sabbath meeting. Though Lizzie and Mehitabel sometimes offer comic relief, the issue of personal and community evil is a burning thread that stitches its way through frontier villages like Haverhill and Andover. Phoebe’s fate is based on a recorded incident (with a different outcome), and diaries and documents of the time give us anecdotes of people made desperate by ruthless self-examination.

The novel also touches on the complex alliances between native tribes and their French and English allies; this, too, is part of the intensity and fear that we see with the godly, allied with ideas of wilderness (that evil place where Satan rules), dark (the uncertain time of day, when evil is freer and what the godly called “nightwalking” is forbidden), and wildness (native men who may be allies or tormentors.)

Satan is a potent figure in the colony’s mind, understood as actively recruiting and busily interfering in the thoughts and choices of the people—moving among them, bodiless and invisible and potent. In contrast,  yes, you’re right; there has been a marked decline in the idea of evil among many Christians today, and there are also many understandings of what the name Satan suggests. Where secular ideas have intermarried with Christian ones, they give birth to new questions. When truth is viewed as relative, how do we begin to grasp evil? When human beings lack any moral order and framework, how can they come to see their experiences, particularly experiences of suffering, as meaningful?

When some post-post-moderns bump into the traditional view of Satan as the fallen angel who is also the “great dragon” and “ancient serpent,” the one who rebelled against God through pride and is infinitely tricksy, I expect that they simply reject all: angel-serpent, symbolism, evil. I remember a man I met in Cambodia, telling me about his sister, killed by one of Pol Pot’s Communist foot soldiers. She was just a girl. She was hungry. She plucked a piece of fruit from a tree in the jungle and was murdered for doing so. Casually, easily killed. She was one mote from out of the Cambodian genocide, some two million souls killed or starved or lost to untreated illness. Wasn’t that shooting an act of evil? Wasn’t the dragon curled around the fatal tree? I look around me and find that the world is a symbolic place. The image of the girl’s hand, reaching up for fruit: it arrows back to the image of Eve’s hand reaching up for the apple. But our ancient serpent whispers this time not to the girl but to the young Khmer Rouge soldier. I think of Lieutenant-General Roméo A. Dallaire, commanding the U. N. assistance mission for Rwanda during the genocide waged against the Tutsi people, saying: “I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.”

History is as complicated as people; mythology is the simplification of humanity. 

There is in our history much that is simplified, modified to support a mythology. I heard this morning an interview on a Lakota documentary how John Ford's The Searchers supported the idea of the Native American as villain (I will ignore the oversimplification of that movie, as to the villains), and the Americans were not the invaders doing a very good job at genocide. That is bunk. Seems to me, many people want to forget slavery and our racism towards the African-American; which, following the movie theme, seems best captured by Gone With the Wind (which I have seen and never bought the African-American characters). Well, that is bunk, too. We ignore completely the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese-American internment camps (although not nearly as much as 50 years ago). 

 I tried in a section of "Chasing Ashes" to touch on Indiana's history of racism towards the Native American and the freed slave. Indiana has - probably out of shame - done its best to ignore that history. It is also a history without its own quirks - Indiana law condemned white men for killing Native Americans. But even the ignoring of history is a history, and the omission has its effects and leaves its marks. I do not know how ell I will pull off writing this conflict and its effects. My mea culpa falls back on this: I do not know a solution other than standing up for our creed of all people being created equal. Where we can go with that remains to the future. We may repudiate that creed. We may live up to it. Either future depends on us acknowledging the past as history, not myth.

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