Mark Twain Thought Chivalry Sucked Too

A dude who thinks chivalry is terribad

Feminists don’t like the whole idea of chivalry much, no? I mean, ask this feminist, and I’ll probably tell you that yes, you should give up your seat to that pregnant lady, and yes, if you see me walking toward a door with a lot of heavy books in my hands, I would thank you for holding it open for me. But that’s because I would totally do the same thing for you! That’s called being polite! What feminists are really complaining about with the whole chivalry thing is that it’s something dudes sometimes use to prove how studly they are to other dudes by infantalizing women in the process. For example, dudes sometimes feel the need to beat up other dudes whenever the lady they are with is insulted. Now once again, if we are in company together and someone says something offensive about me, or another lady, or ladies in general, it is perfectly acceptable for you to speak up with a “wow, not cool” sort of comment, because again that’s just being polite. But if your immediate reaction to an insult directed at the woman you are with is something more like, “That’s MY woman you’re talking about!11!11  YOU HAVE IMPUGNED MY GENTLEMANLY HONOR, YOU KNAVE!!!1!!11 HULK RAGE!11!1!!1″ then I am not so cool with that. As Amanda Hess of the Sexist helpfully explains, when a woman is, say, harassed on a street while in the company of her gentleman associate, she may feel anger on her own behalf because someone thought she was a hooker, but she also feels:

A secondary source of shame, derived from the possibility that someone “may have thought [her fiance] was with a hooker.” Since the woman’s fiance is responsible for her shame as well, he may have a similarly conflicted reaction: (a) anger at the harassers who devalued her based on her gender, and (b) shame that he is associated with a woman who is considered by other men to be valueless. Chivalry encourages him to take personal offense to this, inciting one of two reactions: (a) engaging in a verbal or physical altercation with the harassers in order to compensate for the woman’s shame with a display of manhood; and/or (b) chastising the woman for bringing shame upon him, i.e. “Don’t embarrass me in front of other men”; “Don’t go out looking like that”; “See what you made me do.”

Chivalry has long performed the task of recasting violent oppression as benign paternalism, and you know who recognized this way back in the nineteenth century? Mark Twain. That’s not a name that gets invoked by feminists very often, and for good reason. True to his status as a nineteenth century male, Mark Twain’s gender politics were pretty appalling. I’m trying to think of one female character in one of his novels that isn’t a ridiculous stereotype, and yeah, no. But Mark Twain held many other radically progressive views. He was critical of the American imperial project at a time when the country was clamoring for the expansion of American influence abroad. He was a pacifist, and he hated most organized religion (though I think his own religious views were pretty complex). He also thought that the word chivalry pretty much encompassed everything that was wrong with the United States during his lifetime.  I’m not exaggerating.

See, U.S.-Americans learned about chivalry from Sir Walter Scott, the early nineteenth century author of such novels as Rob Roy and Ivanhoe. In these novels, knightly dudes did knightly things like fight duels (often over women). These knights were always part of a powerful noble class, whose rank was more or less granted to them by God Almighty and whose right to hold that rank was never, ever challenged. Everyone else–i.e. poorer people and women, i.e. a huge percentage of the population of the historical period these novels purported to depict–was pretty much the exclusive property of the male members of that noble class and fawningly served them and existed primarily to provide the picturesque backdrop for the nobles’ heroic pursuits.

The dude Twain blamed for that whole Civil War thing

According to Mark Twain, white Americans, particularly those residing in the South, read about this and said, “This is totes awesome. We totally need something like this right here in the U.S. of A.  And luckily it just so happens that we have a subjugated class of non-persons who can provide our picturesque backdrop built into our society.” In short, Twain argued that the Southern infatuation with Sir Walter Scott-style chivalry was responsible for the perpetuation of slavery and the Civil War. As he says in Life on the Mississippi:

There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner–or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it–would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediaeval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

The newer, sexier Old South

While Twain fully acknowledges that slavery predated the influence of Scott, he argues that Scott provided a heroic language with which to describe slavery and violent oppression, a language that continued to be prevalent even after the Civil War. After Reconstruction was disastrously abandoned, there was a market for fiction that presented the Old South in this highly romanticized fashion. Take, for example, Thomas Nelson Page’s short story “Marse Chan,” a piece of dialect fiction in which a former slave wistfully reminisces about the beautiful, long lost time before the war, in which his heroic master was crossed in love and fought duels. The reason this is told from the former slave’s perspective is to convey the not so subtle subtext that those nice white Southerners treated their slaves so well. See?  The slaves actually liked it!  Stories like this were essential in promoting white solidarity throughout the country after the war, by depicting the Southern lifestyle as quaint and picturesque rather than the human rights catastrophe that it actually was.

Twain’s 1890 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was basically a book length critique of chivalry. In that novel, Twain uses various forms of anachronism to remind us, first of all, that our entire understanding of chivalry is based on a set of myths surrounding King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, a mythology that is heavily mediated by novelists who were writing a millennium after King Arthur allegedly lived. Entire monologues delivered by the medieval characters are cribbed straight from Sir Thomas Malory’s La Morte D’Arthur, which was written in the fifteenth century, in order to mock those who had mistaken mythology for actual history.  The hero of the novel, Hank Morgan, is essentially the surrogate for the white Yankee audience(this dude is from Connecticut and is also totally smug about it). Transported from the late nineteenth century to the “sixth” (the sixth century in this book is essentially just a Sir Walter Scott novel), he spends most of the first act noticing how stupidly the people who inhabit this entirely fictional conception of the medieval period behave, with the implicit message being “HEY SOUTHERNERS, YOU LOOK EFFING RIDICULOUS WHEN YOU DO THAT.” He also observes that the entire system of chivalry seems to exist to perpetuate the completely unearned privilege of a few people, namely the King, his knights, and the Church, the result being that everyone else is essentially a slave.

The violence inherent in the system

Twain’s depiction of “sixth century” slavery in this novel could have been lifted directly from Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs. While this is a comic novel, he is unsparing in his depiction of slavery as a moral outrage. We see couples torn apart, children taken from their mothers, people being savagely beaten. Even worse, Twain shows how violent oppression turns oppressed people on one another. Everyone who isn’t a nobleman or a priest is essentially treated like an animal, but some of them ultimately internalize their own oppression and act as enforcers of the system in order to attain slightly higher status or even just survive. When he witnesses a group of peasants hunting down some other peasants who burned down their lord’s castle in an act of rebellion against that lord’s arbitrary uses of violence, Morgan says:

It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the “poor whites” of our South who were always despised and frequently insulted, by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them.

However, the novel implicitly critiques its narrator as well. Morgan’s smug sense of superiority to the sixth century noblemen is analogous to that of the privileged white people of the North, many of whom expressed disgust over slavery and the backward ways of the South but did absolutely nothing about it. In one scene, Morgan watches a young woman being beaten by a slave driver and utterly fails to intervene, because he fears offending the privileged people he is traveling with:

I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that would not do. I must not interfere too much and get myself a name for riding over the country’s laws and the citizen’s rights roughshod. If I lived and prospered I would be the death of slavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so that when I became its executioner it should be by the command of the nation.

It is worth pointing out that by this point in the novel, Morgan has gone from regarding chivalry with rank disgust to regarding it with a kind of aesthetic appreciation. By virtue of having a nineteenth century knowledge of technology in the sixth century, he has risen to power and privilege and has even begun to see quaint beauty in the system he originally detested, a system that he is now benefiting from. In this passage, we see how that privilege has shaped the way Morgan determines who counts as a “citizen,” whose “rights” are worth respecting, whose “command” matters when it comes to abolishing slavery. I won’t spoil the end of the novel for you. It’s one that you really should go read for yourself, as it’s quick and funny and sneakily profound. Suffice it to say that for all it’s humor, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was sort of shockingly ahead of it’s time (if you read the contemporary reviews, you can see just how much of its subversiveness floated under the nose of Twain’s readers), simultaneously unveiling the role that language and literature play in supporting systems of power decades before Foucault and revealing the horrifying consequences of industrialized warfare decades before the World Wars.

Kids these days

But many of Twain’s other novels contain critiques of chivalry and “Sir Walter disease.” Remember when you read Huckleberry Finn in high school and got to that part at the end where Tom and Huck decide to free Jim but Tom makes everyone engage in this ludicrous role play of a typical captivity narrative (I think The Count of Monte Cristo is his inspiration) and your teacher didn’t really know what to do with that? (Ok, maybe she did and what I’m about to say is not news to you. What I’m about to say did not originate with me). Some people think that final episode makes the entire book a colossal literary failure, but there is a purpose behind it. See, from the beginning of that novel (and in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer is established as the type of kid who likes to act out the scenarios of his favorite books. Absurd shenanigans ensue.  Huckleberry Finn, as a coming of age story, is essentially all about what happens when we forget to put aside our childish ways and use those sorts of games to structure real, adult lives. (I suppose there is also an argument to be made that Huck Finn demonstrates how the systems of privilege and entitlement that structure adult lives begin with childhood play.)  Consider the Duke and the King, two con artists who adopt these sham titles because the Southerners around them will believe in that shit. Then you have the Sandersons and the Grangerfords slaughtering each other over a feud that absolutely no one remembers due to the fetishization of “Family Honor” as a grand, abstract concept.

What Twain is doing with Tom’s little captivity role play is showing how these childish fictions can become serious business. In the process of this little charade, Jim is recaptured, and Tom gets shot. But that episode isn’t just about the ridiculousness of patterning real life after a novel–though that’s pretty much what Twain’s critique of the South and Sir Walter came down to–it’s that enacting the narratives of chivalry requires taking away the autonomy of non-privileged people (Jim and to a certain degree Huck) in order to allow Privileged White Folks (Tom) to live out these self-aggrandizing narratives. Tom’s conception of himself as a Hero is entirely predicated on the fact that Jim has no choice but to play along because his very bodily survival depends on Tom’s benevolence and cooperation, just as the ability of White Southerners to perform chivalry as a class depended upon the existence of a permanent underclass that could be treated as personal property and kept wholly dependent on their masters.

In short, U.S. Americans have a long history of using the rhetoric of chivalry in order to deny autonomy and personhood to certain types of people, and that’s essentially what we’re talking about when feminists critique it. I wouldn’t even begin to argue that the situation of the harassed woman on the street who feels shame on behalf of her partner–because a slight against her is a slight against him, since she belongs to her in some way–is suffering from a form of oppression equivalent to that experienced by black slaves in the American South, or even African Americans in the U.S. today. But it is part of the same cultural logic that says that the performance of Dudely Heroism requires a woman to perform a circumscribed, subordinate role.  Furthermore, it justifies that necessity of that subordinate role by casting it as necessary for her own protection, because in the cultural logic of chivalry, women and other people who are treated as the personal property of white dudes are too ignorant and fragile to take care of themselves. Better they suffer indignities at the hands of one responsible, gentlemanly white man than find out what might happen if they had, you know, bodily autonomy, because dear God, what might happen then?

And this, dear readers, is what chivalry hath wrought.  So saith Mark Twain.

Celebrity Professors, George Lucas, and the Myth of Inviolable Genius

I’ve been sort of keeping up with the comments on The Sexist post that mentioned this blog, specifically my take down of first paragraph of God’s Brain. A few people are sort of mad about it. This one, in particular, stuck out at me:

The writing itself is only packaging for the ideas and research, secondary and kind of irrlevant, unless you are looking for a strawman to attack.

The commenter also suggests that Hess and I are criticizing Tiger because we think boys are icky, but I don’t plan to address my fear of cooties on this blog. I’m also resisting the temptation to digress at length here on the definition of “straw man,” but I think I may cover logical fallacies in a separate post. Instead, I want to address the substance of this critique, which is that when the ideas are good, the packaging (i.e. “the writing”) doesn’t really matter. This sounds an awful lot like a classic lazy student defense: MY IDEAS WERE GOOD WHY DOES IT MATTER THAT MY PAPER WAS ONE 6 PAGE PARAGRAPH!!111!!1 But isn’t there also sort of a statement about privilege going on here? Some people are required to make themselves congenial to their audience in order to hold their attention and have their ideas validated but some are not? I think I’ve heard that before.

Truth is, I think all of us need editors, people who can tell us how to best shape our message, how to make ourselves intelligible, how to present our work in the best possible way.  Western culture is deeply invested in this idea of The Author whose genius is special and individual and must break free from the constraints of “Society” or “Other People” in general in order to find his or her most authentic mode of expression.  But this obscures the fact that creative work is an inherently collaborative process, that no matter whose name gets put on the project, there are a legion of other people who helped bring it into the world.

The dissertation chapter I’m working on right now is on Theodore Dreiser, who wrote some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, novels like Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.  Dreiser’s relationship to the world of publishing was a fractious one.  Some publishers refused to print his works because of the sexual frankness (frankness that would appear decidedly tame now), and his work was frequently censored.  Recently, we’ve seen a variety of “uncensored” editions of Dreiser’s work come out with the juiciest stuff put back in (again, “juicy” is relative here).  The problem is that the difference between what was actually censored in his work and what was culled in order to make the prose more readable gets confused sometimes.  The additional 80 pages of Sister Carrie are a bit more sexual, but they are also pretty repetitive and  do not add very much to the story itself or the development of the characters.  The truth is that Theodore Dreiser, left to his own devices, is difficult to get through.  Raised by working class parents without much in the way of formal education, he was a terrible speller and barely had a working knowledge of punctuation.  But more problematic than that was his tendency to ramble, to repeat himself, to make his novels perhaps a bit more bulky than they absolutely needed to be.  Dare I say that in spite of his difficult relationships with his editors and people like H.L. Mencken, who helped bring his work in to the spotlight, Dreiser really sort of needed them?  That they maybe contributed to making his work precisely what we know and love today?

Another strong example of why accountability is important is George Lucas and the cinematic atrocities that were the three Star Wars prequels. If you have never seen the YouTube video critiques of these films by RedLetterMedia, you must set aside a day to watch them ASAP (disclaimer: There’s kind of a bizarre slasher film parody running alongside the commentary, which definitely warrants a trigger warning). They are hilarious and presented from the perspective of a true Star Wars fan who was disappointed by the tonal inconsistencies, plot contrivances, and overall sloppiness of the way the films were written and put together. In the the final video on The Phantom Menace, the narrator looks at the DVD special features to try to determine what went so wrong:

TRIGGER WARNING: There is a very weird moment at the end that might be upsetting (see above). I think this video series is kind of a cool lesson in narrative technique, and there actually are some excellent points about gender and race fail in Star Wars, so I sort of scrubbed it from my brain. Stop the video around 8:00 if you want to get the gist without being surprised.

The gist of it is that when Lucas was creating the first three films, he was a young, unknown, and untested filmmaker. He had to constantly make a case for his trilogy to skeptical studio executives and the experienced filmmakers who were more or less “put in charge” of him. Many of his original ideas–including bizarre concepts for the main characters, who were originally supposed to be aliens–were scrapped. When Lucas was creating The Phantom Menace, he had a free hand. As the narrator says, everyone in the room seems scared of him, of questioning his judgment. You can actually see how really, really, awful ideas like Jar Jar Binks and a bloated, six part ending are getting a pass, because no one wants to question George Lucas of the George Lucas Empire. As such, “The Phantom Menace is the biggest case of blue balls in cinematic history.”

I know that alot of people liked Avatar, but I have to say that I found James Cameron’s work to be a hell of alot more compelling when he was doing Aliens and Terminator, before he became the King of the World. And here’s the thing: unlike a lot of people, I do not believe that Lucas or Cameron are hacks. At bottom, I think that they are gifted, creative individuals capable of producing both important and enjoyable work. But, EVERYONE NEEDS AN EDITOR. Theoretically, I like the idea of creative people being given the freedom to just create, but I also know that some of the most important art has been created when the artists had to fight for their vision, when they had to overcome adversity and naysayers and budget constraints. Adversity and accountability don’t always go hand in hand, but sometimes they do. When your colleagues are so terrified of challenging you and so intent on impressing you that they are no longer capable of delivering honest feedback, your work is probably going to suffer.

I think that happens sometimes to famous academics as well. Publishing houses are so excited just to sign them, knowing that they could have gone elsewhere, that they do not challenge them as much as they would a previously unpublished scholar. Given the state of academic publishing right now and the extent to which it may become dependent on its ability to produce material accessible to the general public, that is a real shame. And it’s also sort of perplexing. I realize that Lucasfilm, which has to consist of more people in authority with substantial stakes in the company’s future than just George Lucas, made gobs of money off the prequels. I wonder how much more they might have made if they had been good. Because academic publishing barely clears the costs of printing some books (though to be clear, marketability and the profit-motive shouldn’t be the only concern here), can publishers really afford to print ones that are poorly written?

Why I’m Not Proud of You for Correcting Other People’s Grammar, Part Deux

Yesterday, I wrote a 3000 word post about grammar that some folks seemed to like. The point of that post was that grammatical correctness is often confused for facility with words, that the former is a step toward the latter but not the entirety of it. I argued that it is more important for writers, be they students or professionals, to say what they mean. In that post, I used a sample from Lionel Tiger’s new book–a sample originally posted on The Sexist–to show how grammatically correct writing can sometimes become unreadable. Amanda Hess evidently saw the trackback and liked it, because she devoted a whole post to it! And traffic on this blog has increased by like 2000%! And I’ve had to delete some trolls who didn’t actually read the post, which is, I think, a blogger rite of passage!  So, thank you Amanda Hess!

Today, however, I am going to offer up an example of how language can be used beautifully, how a writer can use sophisticated sentence structures and even non-standard grammar to great effect. I just finished teaching Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to my Literature and Religion class, so I might as well go with that. When students first encounter Rushdie’s prose, they often find it difficult to wade through, but as I will show, the complexity of it–the way he piles images and motifs onto one another–actually enhances the ideas he is presenting without obscuring them. In other words, it’s challenging in a good way. It immerses you in the ideas instead of pulling you out of them.  Let’s start with the third paragraph of the first chapter, which begins with two men falling from the sky:

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. “Ohe, Salad baba, it’s you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.” At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater’s face. “Hey, Spoono,” Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, “Proper London, bhai! here we come! Those bastards down there won’t know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. Dharrraaammm!Wham!, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear, splat.”

Ok, first of all, let’s get one thing straight. This is not stream of consciousness narrative. My students are quick to toss this term onto the table, but it isn’t accurate. One of the Amazon commenters on Tiger’s book referred to it as “stream of consciousness,” which has come to mean, I think, “prose I don’t understand.” Stream of consciousness narrative attempts to replicate the thought processes of an individual mind and reads the way it does (not easily) because when we think, our thoughts jump around. Perception and cognition aren’t coherent or linear. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is representative of stream of consciousness because we never leave the mind of the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus. The first two sections of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury are stream of consciousness because they occupy the minds of Benjy and Quentin, and they are difficult to read because neither of these two characters are neurotypical.

No, The Satanic Verses employs a straightforward omniscient narrator, and omniscient narrator who turns out to be Satan actually, but we don’t know that at this point in the novel. The terms that best describes Rushdie’s prose are non-linear or surrealistic, though magic realism is the generic name for this type of fiction. Magic realism is where the narrative clearly inhabits the “real world” (i.e. this isn’t Narnia or Middle Earth) but crazy supernatural stuff happens. However, you also have to account for the fact that Rushdie often uses the speech patterns of Central Asian English speakers in his prose, and that is part of what de-familiarizes it, though in an intriguing way, I think. There is an aural quality to his writing that makes for great out-loud reading. As an Indian man who grew up in the wake of the British Raj and inhabits a globalizing society, he is interested in how linguistic groups from the former colonies have adapted the language of their colonizers. But he isn’t exactly doing dialect, which has historically been used as a kind of literary black-face. He isn’t trying to convey a character’s accent through non-standard spelling. Instead, he reproduces the idiom and cadence of those speech patterns, which is really effing cool.

In this paragraph, he is introducing the two main characters of the novel and showing us that they are complete opposites, “levity against gravity.” Though Gibreel’s banter and his mode of falling, we get a sense of his exuberance and wonder. Then we see Saladin Chamcha with his buttoned up suit, bowler hat, rigid posture, and hatred of nicknames and immediately understand that he is a grouch. Gibreel is sort of loving this unlikely and surely terrifying experience, but Saladin is clearly hating it. If you got nothing more out of that paragraph than what I just said, you would be perfectly capable of grasping what happens in the rest of the chapter and the rest of the novel. In other words, it is possible to have a purely straight foward, non-symbolic understanding of this paragraph if that’s your thing.  But there is actually more going on here, and one of the beauties of Rushdie’s prose is that it rewards you on the second and third and fourth reading. Having read this book something like five times, I now know enough about what is about to come to appreciate how Rushdie uses these early paragraphs to set up all of his themes.

In traditional sonata format–the compositional structure that informed a lot of the classical music you hear–the first section is called the Exposition. This is where the composer introduces the tonal key and musical ideas he plans to explore in the rest of the piece. That’s essentially what Rushdie does here. For one thing, there is actual music here.  Gibreel falls while singing, an activity that presages the significance of “verses,” namely the verses of the Qu’ran later in the book.  We are also about to learn that Saladin Chamcha, an Indian expatriate who lives in London, has shunned his past and family history. His fractured relationship with his father, his embarrassment about coming from the “third world,” and his desire to impress the British have led him to become, well, T.S. Eliot or something. He has reinvented himself and become more British than the British, adopting a stereotypically “proper” mode of dress (the grey suit and bowler hat). Furthermore, the nickname that Gibreel uses–”Spoono,” which is a play on Saladin’s Anglicized last name, which used to be Chamchawala and is now Chamcha–translates to something like “sell-out.” Saladin’s truncated name is a derogatory word for Indians who collaborated with the British under the Raj, and Gibreel is mocking him for it. Conversely, Gibreel, a Bollywood film star, is the pop culture icon of his nation. He is exuberant in his Indianness, and that is partly why Saladin finds his nattering–so different from Saladin’s, due to his attempts to erase his linguistic past from his speech patterns–so irritating.

But it gets even more trippy than that. Rushdie slyly sneaks in many of the leitmotifs that will become significant in the rest of the novel. The big theme of this book is transformation. He is exploring the way the post-colonial experience has metamorphosed not only individuals but entire cultures, the way in which it is in the process of transforming both colonizer and colonized in frightening and unintended ways. Gibreel and Saladin are about to be changed into the forms of the angel Gabriel (Gibreel adopts “heraldic postures” in the air) and the Devil respectively (there’s that whole magic realism thing) following this fall from the sky. The first sentence of the book is “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’” So after metaphorically “dying” by falling from an airplane that was taking them from India to Britain and was blown up by a suicide bomber, they emerge from the English Channel bearing these new forms, which will symbolize the divergent fates that await immigrants on the shores of a new country.

So this paragraph is laden with images of transformation. Among Gibreel’s many mid-air stunts, he performs a “butterfly-stroke,” and butterflies will become an important metamorphosis image later on. We also have the exploration of liminal space. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word for threshhold and means the space in between spaces or states of being. Victor Turner applied the term to religious rituals he observed in his ethnographic research.  In the space of the ritual, social boundaries evaporated and roles were reversed. One might say that it is in the liminal space of the Eucharist that the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Liminal spaces are where things pause on the way to becoming other things, where the magic happens. When Rushdie speaks of “the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn,” this is what he is talking about–the in between time where these people are no longer what they were but not yet what they are going to be, no longer night, but not yet morning.

There are multiple liminal spaces in The Satanic Verses, but the two important ones in this paragraph are water and air. the air part is obvious. That’s what they’re falling through. It is the medium they inhabit between the wreckage of the airplane, carrying their past lives, and the new life ahead with all of it’s uncertainty. Thin air is a dangerous place, but it is also a spiritual place. Gibreel himself refers to “thin air” at the end of this paragraph, and that phrase gets repeated twice in the next paragraph. (Ok, how cool would it be if it turned out that Jon Krakauer’s book title was a reference to this?)  That paragraph also references Mount Everest, the obsession of British mountain climber Allie Cone, who sees ghosts and angels after ascending the highest mountain in the world without supplemental oxygen. High spaces, where the air is thin, are spaces in which we face mortality, in which the barriers between life and death, earth and the afterworld are rendered permeable. This is also true of water, which is the space of birth but also of drowning, the space of baptism and ritual cleansing but also of destruction (later we are introduced to a desert city made of sand, where water represents a threat). Rushdie is playing with these two mediums by having Gibreel literally “swim” through the air as they plummet toward the sea.

These are profoundly religious images. Angels, demons, baptism, rebirth, judgement. Rushdie mines the myths of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism for metaphors and narratives that help him explain how post-colonial migrants experience this new world. In doing so, he is giving that story dignity, but he is also commenting on the role that religion itself plays in public life. Gibreel alludes to this when he mentions “meteor or lightning or vengeance of God.” Rushdie is concerned about what happens when these religious myths and metaphors cease being metaphorical and start structuring our lives in potentially scary ways: when religion is used to justify oppressing people or blowing up planes. Gibreel will ultimately style himself as the instrument of God’s vengeance upon the unfaithful (namely, people he does not like or trust), and that brings him to a bad end.

And all of that stuff is expressed within that one dense paragraph. As I said, even without knowing all that is foreshadowed here, you could get the major point. The complexity adds meaning to the text rather than obfuscating it. It’s difficult to say the same for Tiger’s “enchanted puzzlement.” No words are wasted here.

Yet two weeks ago, one of my undergrads moaned, “Why can’t he just use proper grammar?” This happened. I’m not making it up. It’s at times like these when I wish my classroom came equipped with trap doors under each chair like at Dr. Evil’s conference table. First of all, this student and his ilk clearly did not recognize that most of Rushdie’s prose is grammatically correct. He does deliberately use things like sentence fragments in dialogue because that is how most people talk, and most novelists since the Victorian era have felt free to break that rule. What they seem to be reacting to is the non-linearity and complexity of it. And I’m actually ok with that. Occasionally, good writing doesn’t bottle-feed you. This is why we have English class.

When you were a snotty teenager and first saw abstract art, wasn’t your first reaction something like, “Feh, I could do that.” The truth is, no you couldn’t. Most abstract and surrealist artists had to learn how to do photo-realistic drawing and painting before they moved on to paint splatters and blocks of color. Grammar is sort of like that. You have to learn how to play by the rules so that you can selectively break them when it serves your purpose. As a former Washington Post columnist, Rushdie has proven time and time again that he is capable of writing lucid expository prose. Here is what he says about the stories religion gives us, the stories that inform alot of his fiction, in a 1997 letter to the “Six Billionth World Citizen” and reprinted in the non-fiction collection Step Across this Line:

Many of these stories will strike you as extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of “dead” religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them must become a ital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity. It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other, properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

Okay, I chose this passage on purpose, not only because it speaks to the themes of The Satanic Verses but because it says something rather similar to what the Tiger example says. It’s talking about the intractability of public discussions about religion as an evolutionarily and aesthetically important part of human history because the enemies and champions of religion essentially have nothing to say to one another and don’t want anyone else to talk about it either. But look what we have here: modifiers, some of them even arguably extraneous, but none of which impede the flow of the writing. In addition, we have poignant metaphors, sentence variety, neat shifts from lofty to vernacular language, from “pretexts” to “order you around.” The meaning of this paragraph is transparent and well-said. It’s quotable, even. I can read it out loud to my class (which I did) and maintain their rapt attention.

That’s what language, in the right hands, can really do. Rushdie is capable of using both standard and non-standard grammar because of that fluency thing. He commands the English language. Every word does what he wants and needs it to do.