Week 16 Rushdie and Desai

Notes on Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair”

Magic realism is an ancient genre, dating back to Apuleius and the Alexandrian novel, and of course most famous in relation to South American writers like Borges. It allows for radical, unannounced changes in perspective, and the kinds of exploration that sort of change makes possible. Apuleius, for example, makes his hero turn into an ass, and we learn a lot about human beings from that trick.

Why does Hashim deserve to find the vial? He finds it twice, in fact—that is supernatural. Once, maybe—but twice in the very same place? Well, he is a polite hypocrite. The Koran’s second book starts right out denouncing the kind of person who only pretends to believe in Allah. That’s pretty much Hashim’s camp. He does bad things and rationalizes them as good things—70% interest becomes, for instance, the means of making others “realize the value of money.” And the long-standing politeness of his household turns out to be a ridiculous fraud. He has a mistress and frequents prostitutes, despises his wife, considers his daughter a slut, and his son a “dope.” The vial of hair acts like a truth serum, forcing him to cough up all his secrets. So he becomes a creature of fierce extremes—devout in the formal sense, yet savage in his lack of consideration for his family and others. Perhaps this is the punishment for dishonesty.

The Prophet’s hair is a natural object with sacred properties, and it finds out those who are unworthy of it. It touches worldly people to their ruin. Notice that Hashim is a collector of rare objects—a fetishist. And that is what he does with his find. It’s probably true that Muhammad would be horrified to find his body being treated as a sacred relic, but Hashim’s veneration is anything but religious, that point aside.

Notes on Anita Desai’s “Scholar and Gypsy”

David must have everything on his own cultural terms. His unstated thesis must simply be ethnocentrism, backed up by an objectivity that presupposes it by way of denial. The author knows better than to set up a pristine “India” free of Western influence. The town they travel to is authentic not because it has some inner national essence but rather because it has something both American farm girls and Indian natives can appreciate. The town seems to invite a person in, but keeps its distance anyway. The villagers themselves are not selling out to the Anglo Americans. The people who come to the village must change and adapt, and it doesn’t work so much the other way around. But again, the villagers are by no means naïve or primitive.

I should also mention the point I make when teaching the Bhagavad-Gita. Eastern religion teaches that we gain knowledge by intuition, not by scientific discovery -- we must strip away or allow to be stripped away whatever gets between us and intuition. (Unforgetting.) David’s scientific way of understanding or perceiving and learning differs. Pat understands religion in an intuitive sense, and isn’t interested in erudite or doctrinal fine points. She doesn’t even care about the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, which of course is a major point of contention in India. But it doesn’t matter, I believe, because she understands something far more important about religion. Her point about finding Buddha in a Hindu temple makes perfect sense, and it would make sense as well based on a reading of the Bhagavad-Gita.

The story is structured as follows, we find more indirect perspective and more from David, who is self-centered, while Pat speaks even to the end, she doesn’t say much. Perhaps that is because the change she has undergone cannot be fully conveyed in language. It may also be that the narrator tells much of the conclusion to reduce their argument to a conventional and abstract form -- it fits into the genre of the breakup due to irreconcilable differences.

A comment on science versus intuition: we go to a place like India looking for something based upon our own story; there is no culture duty-free India zone. There may well be something essential there to discover, but it is not “India.” A sociologist like David sets up elaborate schemes to neutralize Western bias, and probably the personal story he brings with him to India. But the act of neutralizing biases in this way is probably the most Western thing a person can do.

When the Indian tourists make fun of the Western hippies listening to a guru, are they correct or confused? Perhaps the hippies are confused in their own right and somewhat naïve or even essentialist, or perhaps not. This would be a good question to ask in class. I have asked before why it is that when traditional Westerners come into contact with Eastern culture and religion, some of them become almost fanatical in rejecting everything about Western culture. Why is that? Pat follows this pattern, but I’m not sure we are meant to take her as deluded or naïve.