11 - Conclusion

Summary

In the Conclusion to the first edition of this book I invoked the idea of Salman Rushdie as a ‘pilgrim of the imagination’, contrasting the commitments of fiction to other kinds of commitment in the world. I reproduce one page of this argument here.

But the engagement of fiction belongs to another order – to our imaginative conditioning rather than to our actual conditions, to what Shelley called ‘the primary laws of our nature’ rather than to the law of the land (or the laws of another land). And here Rushdie's accomplishment is both more perplexing and more profound, and of more enduring value. In everything he has written, from Grimus to The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie has explored on our behalf the hazards of being human, the limits of our human nature, as far as fiction can fathom it; and then beyond, into the intimations that lie beyond story itself in the very ground of our mental activity, among the archetypal prefigurings of being.

As Ayesha led her pilgrims to Mecca, through the waters of the Arabian Sea (was it to death, or resurrection?), we should perhaps regard Salman Rushdie himself as a pilgrim of the imagination, and reach each of his novels as a stage in that pilgrimage. Flapping Eagle is a pilgrim through the levels of reality he encounters on Calf Island; Saleem Sinai leads the imaginative pilgrimage of the midnight children into modern India; Omar Khayyam Shakil is a peripheral pilgrim on the penitential journey of Pakistan. The Satanic Verses is an over-determined pilgrimage: from the vision of the founding of Islam to the literal pilgrimage of Ayesha, from the freefall metamorphosis ‘even unto death’ of Gibreel Farishta to the painful process of personal change that has to be endured by Saladin Chamcha before he can return to life, everything in this novel confirms that the transformation of life can be achieved only through travail. In the same spirit, Haroun takes his father on the healing voyage to the spring of storytelling. Rushdie's short stories involve several pilgrims, from Columbus as pilgrim-in-waiting in Spain to modern migrants making (or failing to make) their difficult way in different corners of the world.