Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1
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Buried Stars in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet / Stanka Radović
Abstract: Rushdie's own global stardom, built on his celebration of migrancy and uprootedness as well as on the “fatwa” that marked him as a global target, informs his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In this novel, Rushdie's usual focus on crossing boundaries and challenging national loyalties follows the musical stardom of his two protagonists, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama. They not only evoke famous pop stars, like Madonna or Michael Jackson, but also the trans-historical allegiance to the most enduring myth of poetic dislocation, the myth of Orpheus. In exploring the musical star's potential to cross the impossible boundaries (even between the living and the dead), Rushdie examines the star's claim to ubiquity and radical displacement: what if the desire to be everywhere amounts to existing nowhere? My essay focuses on Rushdie's most potent image of the star's rootless existence — the vexed relationship between groundedness and transcendence. What kind of spatiality emerges from this unresolved desire to be at one and the same time rooted and migrant, human and super-human, author and product, temporal and timeless? Because it seems impossible to close the gap that separates these conceptual binaries, I question the postcolonial reliance on the notion of “interstitiality,” which aims to resolve the problem of conceptual and geographical dislocation created by such binary propositions.
<1> If Salman Rushdie has indeed become “a household name from Peoria to Peshawar, […] literature‘s first global celebrity – as famous as a pop star” (Power), it seems appropriate to examine The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) – his only novel about pop stardom – in relation to his own celebrity status. Following Barry King‘s analysis of the rapidly deteriorating distinction between stardom and celebrity, I will discuss Rushdie and his protagonists both as stars with a demonstrated skill in a “focused realm of performance,” and as celebrities produced by their “market-indexed popularity.” (King 9) [1] Due to the tremendous success of Midnight‘s Children (1981) and Shame (1983), Rushdie‘s literary acclaim greatly precedes the infamous fatwa, which was nevertheless instrumental in propelling him towards global notoriety. In an interview with Peter Kadzis, Rushdie describes his reaction to this long-distance death sentence as one of “disappointment” because “it‘s a terrible thing to be famous for the wrong thing.” (Rushdie/Kadzis) For decades since its pronouncement and various subsequent re-affirmations, the fatwa has made this already migrant writer an exile in all places, drawing more sharply into focus the problem of “the unsolidity of solid ground” (The Ground 54), which permeates most of Rushdie‘s writing and, at the same time, characterizes contemporary global stardom. The gesture of locating Rushdie-the-star anywhere “from Peoria to Peshawar” suggests as much: everywhere, nowhere in particular, and in all the places in-between. The geographical coordinates are random, symbolic and ultimately irrelevant. They merely stand for the immensity of name and stature, which are disembodied and, by the same token, aspatial. This lack of grounding and the condition of “outsideness” (The Ground 42) to all places lead me to examine in this essay the in-between status of the star and the death threat by which that interstitial existence is brought into being. Rushdie‘s outsiders – “outcasts, lepers, pariahs, exiles, enemies, spooks, paradoxes” – can always be relegated to “the bin of history” (The Ground 43-44) where, treated like waste paper or surplus, they serve to confirm the accepted and familiar. Interestingly enough, as Rushdie‘s novel seeks to show, stars – like outsiders – ultimately also fail to belong and can be thrown away once they have served the purpose of affirming the ground beneath our feet by losing their own footing. Moreover, this global “outsideness” is a condition that Rushdie carefully promotes in all of his writings, so that virtually every reading of Rushdie‘s work and life is shaped in advance by the critical concepts that he embeds in his fiction and circulates in his interviews and autobiographical essays, thus successfully controlling the reception of his image.
<2> Following the pattern of transforming fiction into reality (of which the fatwa is also an example, however misguided and tragic), the uncanny overlaps between the real and the imaginary worlds are not only part and parcel of Rushdie‘s authorial life; they also occur, quite appropriately, in the real world surrounding his novel. For example, the lyrics to the song “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” written and performed by Vina and Ormus‘ band VTO (The Ground 475) are eventually set to music and sung by the real-life superstar band, U2. [2] Rushdie also makes his cameo appearance in the video for this song. In 1993, he briefly joins U2 on stage at Wembley Stadium during their Zooropa tour. Reflecting on this event in his essay “U2,” he maintains that the difference between “eighty thousand fans cheering you on” and the much smaller crowds at book readings signals the gap separating the rock star from the writer. It was inevitable that he and U2 should be criticized for “bringing these two worlds together” (95). In response, Rushdie reminds us: “I‘ve been crossing frontiers all my life – physical, social, intellectual, artistic borderlines – and I spotted, in Bono and Edge […] an equal hunger for the new, for whatever nourishes.” (95) This explicit and very star-like hybridization of artistic and personal content shifts the focus, as Barry King argues, from representation to presentation and transforms the star, in this case Rushdie, into “a personal brand” (King 9). So the star is not only someone well regarded or well known, but also someone capable of staging him/herself with a particular flair for self-production. When Rushdie appears on stage with Bono and then gives us the appropriate reading of that appearance, a reading that yet again foregrounds his migrant nature and his border-crossing existence, the result is the image itself and the blurb to that image. This talent for staging a product and accompanying it with a catchy slogan, even if that product is one‘s own personality, sends us back to Rushdie‘s early career as an advertising copywriter with various advertising agencies, such as Ogilvy & Mather among others. For cream cakes, he remembers having come up with “Naughty. But nice.” For Aero chocolate biscuits, “Delectabubble” and “Irresistibubble.” [3] This knack for memorable turns of phrase, which brand our memory with ideas for consumption, resurfaces in Rushdie‘s prose to alert us that literature too may be one of the products we hungrily consume along with the brand name of its author and his sloganish self-presentations.
<3> Any reflection on stardom seeks to define precisely what it means to be a celebrity, an icon, a famous or notorious person, a star. Yet it is essential for a star to remain elusive and detached, faintly glowing above us in some distant space of divine humanity, freed of specific coordinates and ties to temporal existence. In the interview with Kadzis, Rushdie claims to be interested in “the way in which we as a culture use celebrities,” described precisely as “instances of human beings enlarged to divine proportions.” (Rushdie/Kadzis) They become part of an experiment that the public needs and avidly observes from a safe distance:
[…] we take this group of people and we shine on them a very bright light and give them, if not great power, then certainly great influence. We ask how they behave when we remove all controls and restraints, and we enjoy watching the answer to that question. (Rushdie/Kadzis)
Yet, even in the course of this experimental unmooring, what stardom forces us to remember and lures us to forget is our material link to a specific time and place. In his book The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (2008), discussing the nature of iconic stardom most often attributed to female figures such as Princess Diana, Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe, Daniel Herwitz argues that the star is “a being caught between transcendence and trauma in her own life and in the public‘s gaze on her.” (ix) Devoting a significant portion of his introductory argument to Princess Diana‘s funeral in 1997, viewed by an estimated 2.5 billion people, Herwitz argues that this event represented a telling culmination of a life known primarily through the media. Diana‘s appeal to such a large adoring public rests, Herwitz explains, on her fundamentally “in-between” status by which she resembles other iconic stars of this century: “Half fairy-tale/half woman-on-the verge of melodrama, these beings exist between real life and the netherworld of the camera and in death become radiant icons in the museum of the public‘s imagination.” (13) What emerges is Princess Diana as a fictional repository of mundane identifications (a lot of people spoke of her life as being similar to theirs: her loveless marriage, eating disorders, vulnerability, etc.) and divine expectations (she was a princess from a fairy-tale, rich and famous, beautiful and almost godly). This dual role of a star is, in Leo Braudy‘s words, typical of modern fame, which is “compounded of the audience‘s aspirations and its despair, its need to admire and to find a scapegoat for that need.” (9) The iconic scapegoat is therefore at the mercy of its public, always threatened by the possibility of being forgotten or replaced. Herwitz reminds us, however, that scapegoating has a deeper meaning still: it is the tendency of the faithful audiences to feed on their chosen stars, to cannibalize and incorporate them into their own lives. In this sense, the star is paradoxically the most intimate aspect of her fan‘s life as well as its most distant aspiration. The appeal of stardom ultimately resides in this paradox of proximity and distance. The location of stardom, seen from this perspective, has to be defined as a hybrid state neither here, among humans, nor there, among the gods: stardom is a condition of standing on the edge in order to transcend or fall.
<4> Salman Rushdie‘s 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet reflects on this problem of notoriety and fame that – with a fatwa issued against him on February 14, 1989 – became very familiar to Rushdie himself. The novel begins with this fateful date and traces the lives of three protagonists in their mythical/historical journey from the Old to the New World, from Bombay to London to New York. Their trajectory is, at the same time, a rise to unprecedented fame: Vina Apsara is an unrivaled goddess of song while Ormus Cama, her lover and future husband, holds the key to the earth-shattering beauty of musical composition. Our third protagonist is the narrator Rai, who is, ironically, tone-deaf although his very name designates a form of contemporary Algerian fusion music. Rai is a photographer, the incarnation of the public gaze and the gaze of the media in which the two stars, Ormus and Vina are suspended and preserved for eternity.
<5> In constructing the story of these three characters, Rushdie traces two parallel lines of reflection on metamorphic migrancy: the borderline existence of historical migrants and postcolonial peoples and, by reviving the myth of Orpheus, the mythical threshold between the living and the dead. As Rachel Falconer convincingly shows, Rushdie multiplies the Orphic identity and endows all three of his protagonists with Orphic tasks as they all, at one time or another in the novel, set out on a journey of katabasis, a journey to the underworld to redeem a beloved (Falconer 480). However, as the Orphic myth already tells us, the casting of the fateful backward gaze somewhere on the threshold between the worlds arrests the beloved among the dead. By tracing the crucial moments of this interstitial existence of the Orphic hero between our world and the underworld, Rushdie explores the meaning of modern fame as a problem of hybrid existence in which tragic death is a necessary component of stardom. The deadly gaze that pushes the figure of adoration into death, is incarnated, as Rushdie explains, in the narrator‘s occupation:
He‘s a photographer because I thought, if you look left of a rock star, you‘ll find the photographer. And if you want a point-of-view character, a slightly voyeuristic point-of-view character, it seemed a perfectly appropriate choice of profession. (Rushdie/Kadzis)
Rai is, quite fittingly, obsessed with creating images of double exposure, a photographic technique but also, since Vladimir Khodasievich‘s poem “Sorrento Photographs” (1927), a potent metaphor for “the divided and confused consciousness of the exile, whose mixed images of home and abroad have the effect of defamiliarizing – of making strange in Shklovsky‘s sense – both the experience of exile life and memories of home.” (Brown 346) In The Ground, Rushdie pursues with equal passion precisely this question of the migrant‘s estrangement between the overlapping worlds.
<6> Orpheus is, according to the myth, eventually dismembered by his drunken female fans who cannot tolerate his exclusive and undying love for Eurydice. This cannibalization of the poet-musician by the raving crowd is another element typical of stardom. I wish to argue here that, far from using the Orphic myth merely as a way of reflecting on lasting love or the power of metamorphic art, Rushdie reads it as a story of deadly fame: a contract between the artist and the underworld, the loss of human location on the threshold between worlds, and finally the ritualized death of the star by dismemberment so reminiscent of the Beatles‘ screaming fans shredding their clothes and reaching for their bodies like the frenzied Bacchantes in Orpheus‘ case. [4] After Vina‘s death, for example, the inconsolable Ormus Cama enlists a series of Vina look-alikes to replace her on stage. In a telling incident that reflects Rushdie‘s view of the potentially murderous public, the most successful of the surrogate stars, Mira Celano, is almost shredded by the fans: when she dives into the crowd, “the hands are starting to claw at her body.” When she regains the stage, she stands defiantly “front and center in her ripped leather pants and sings bleeding and bare-breasted right into their goddamn murderous ungrateful faces” (551). The crowd, whose hungry devotion raises the star onto the throne, also serves to topple and drag her down: the love and hate for the star are here one and the same emotion through which the audience asserts its ultimate power over the leader of the cult. In this inextricable sharing of power, the gestures of devotion and destruction are indistinguishable: the star is only as powerful as the crowd – the “adoring constituency” (486) – lets her be, while the crowd only exists in relation to its select leader.
<7> The modern phenomenon of fame or infamy (as the case may be) leads Rushdie to explore his own and postcolonial theory‘s favorite problematic of “interstitiality” or “in-betweenness” in which the fundamental internal and external displacement entails a haunted ex-centric relationship between the self and the world and suggests a form of “borderline existence” (Bhabha 13). In The Loction of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha connects this frontier status to the development of a new kind of world literature with a transnational global character:
The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of “otherness” . Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees – these border and frontier conditions – may be the terrains of world literature. (12)
Connecting the story of postcolonial migrancy to an increasingly global and post-national existence, Bhabha focuses on the historical margin of the political outcast who first flees, with centrifugal force, the centers of political power and then returns, centripetally, to haunt them with unsettled historical memories. At the risk of trivializing this fundamental postcolonial concern, I would like to suggest here that the iconic star, like Princess Diana for example, seems to share with Bhabha‘s outcast this “border condition” of living on the threshold of colliding worlds and attempting to go beyond – to transcend – the border or fault line. Just like Bhabha‘s favorite literary figures, the star is “translational” and “transnational” (Bhabha 248), always deeply rooted in a particular history and place and at the same time mythically atemporal and utopian. The star is, to borrow (as one must!) Rushdie‘s words of self-description, a being “borne-across” or translated between her actual location and that of her ubiquitous audiences.
<8> The Ground Beneath Her Feet opens with the main protagonist Vina Apsara‘s death. She is swallowed by an earthquake in Mexico on February 14, 1989, the day that Rushdie‘s fatwa was declared. Valentine‘s Day of love is, at the same time, the day of death and destruction. Vina is, as Geetha Ganapathy-Dore argues “a fictional shadow of Princess Diana, Tina Turner, Madonna and many others,” but also “an emblematic figure of lost love like Eurydice.” (21) And like any star, Vina is a repository of everything and anything that her public needs. She is adored for her talent, her scandalous honesty and her willingness to share her most intimate experiences. She rises higher into fame the more she appears to descend to meet the ordinary concerns of her fans. In an interesting flurry of disparate journalistic sound bites, Rushdie describes Vina as a vacant screen for her audience‘s projections. She is everything and anything the viewers are able to imagine yet, paradoxically, she also disappears from us the more she is described:
That she was loved, of course I always knew. The facts about her public persona were not in doubt: that people in countries she had never visited cherished her for the beauty of her voice; that millions of males desired her body and dreamed of her at night; that women of all ages admired and were grateful for her outspokenness, her fearlessness, her musicianship; that when she campaigned against famine, or for the alleviation of the third world‘s burden of debt, or on behalf of various environmental and vegetarian agencies, the world‘s leaders, expecting to patronize her, to pat her on the backside and ignore her demands, were first impressed, then seduced and finally coerced into significant concessions by her quickness of intellect, her determination, her grasp; that she was intensely famous, fabulously photogenic, overwhelmingly sexy and great good fun; and that she was the first superstar of the age of confession, who, by her willingness to bare her scars, to live her private life in public, to talk about her wounds, her mistakes, her faults, found a direct line to the world‘s ashamed unconfident heart, so that, extraordinary and powerful and successful as she was, she came to be seen as an ordinary woman writ large, flawed yet worthy, strong and weak, self-reliant and needy. She was a rock goddess of the golden age, but she was improbably, also one of us. (476, original italics and emphasis)
In this excerpt, the inaccessible stardom is supposedly just a version of “us,” a version in which the genuine diversity and irreconcilable differences of a multitude are flattened and equalized in order to be abstracted into a single marketable form. As Barry King shows, “pure celebrity develops as a fetish of capitalism that insinuates that one individual – normally the entrepreneur or capitalist – is the possessor of a catalytic kind of labor that alone can valorize the labor of others.” (17) In this manner, the celebration of plurality of the masses is a convenient disguise for a single-image control of that plurality epitomized in the star. Rushdie‘s lofty account of Vina‘s fame is a deeply familiar accumulation: she is at one and the same time a sex goddess, source of envy, political ambassador, glamorous version of Mother Theresa, protagonist of a reality soap opera presented in media installments, and finally, an empty space of the public‘s myriad projections. Larger than life and completely lifeless.
<9> What Rushdie captures in this description and in the novel as a whole, is the incongruous proliferation of meanings and descriptions, which follow the star and insure her existence. As Barry King argues, this new grammar of celebrity relies on “the commodification of personality and the formation of exchange value out of what appears to be the natural value of the person.” (10) At the same time, however, the quoted passage sounds like the hyperbolic chatter of media coverage, fans, and gossipmongers. Vina‘s, like Rushdie‘s, fame is not based on something concrete or verifiable but proceeds, as the name of the Greek goddess “Fama” already suggests, through rumor and hear-say. Indeed, Rachel Falconer describes The Ground Beneath Her Feet as a chatty book (470), yet this chatter serves as the harbinger of fame and replicates, in the very style of the novel, its fundamental concern with the manner in which a life mediated though images and reviews slowly but surely slips into the underworld, arrested in its progress by the powerful pull of immortality that can only be achieved through death. Reflecting on the power of images to capture their object in his essay “On Being Photographed,” Rushdie observes that “the camera is a weapon: a photograph is a shot, and a session is a shoot, and a portrait may therefore be the trophy the hunter brings home from his shikar. A stuffed head on his wall.” (104)
<10> Falconer argues that, “in underworldly journeys, all the normal forms of time by which we measure experience are blocked; likewise, spatial forward movement is arrested. Narrative space and time are projected onto a vertical axis; that is, they are rearranged as a system of value.” (473) What results, in the context of Rushdie‘s novel, is a hierarchy of fame, ascent and descent on the waves of stardom: there is no movement that does not become cyclical to take us exactly where we began. Even in the structure of the narrative, we begin with Vina‘s ending only to trace her past that will bring us to the moment of her death and close the circle. This circle is the wheel of fortune, a rise and fall of the star. This circle is also a wide gaping mouth of the earth that in the end swallows Vina, but it is also Vina‘s screaming mouth from which, in a nightmare that precedes her death, issues only the noise of “popping flashbulbs” (3). Describing Vina‘s demise, Rushdie writes:
Then the ground simply opens and eats her, like a mouth. A great sweep of Pacific coastline is similarly, simultaneously, devoured. The slip of the earthquake is eleven meters: huge. The ocean boils in and fills the gash in the earth, a tear in reality. Water, earth, fire belch high into the sky. The deaths, the disappearances, are measures in tens, the hundreds of thousands. The earth closes over her body, bites, chews, swallows, and she‘s gone. (472, original emphasis)
In this final image of Vina‘s life, the earth itself is a mythical monster that will devour the star and bury her forever, thus emphasizing ground over transcendence. Thousands of other people die in this earthquake, Rushdie suggests, but it is Vina‘s death that is exemplary and iconic, shorthand for all other deaths and disappearances, something everyone can mourn unanimously and without real pain.
<11> In the September 15, 1997 issue of The New Yorker, Rushdie published an article, entitled “Crash,” in response to Princess Diana‘s tragic death. [5] Examining the link between various signs of glamour, from the motorcar to the beauty pursued by the camera, Rushdie reflects on contemporary culture “in which the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities, too – a transformation that has often proved powerful enough to destroy them.” (109) The deadly camera is the sublimation of our own gaze as it acts on our behalf, fulfilling our craving for the lab experiment with our favorite glam-rats, as they race in circles for our entertainment. At the same time, he sees in Princess Diana a celebrity “skillful at constructing the images of herself that she wanted people to see.” (111) This same skill characterizes, as I already suggested, Rushdie‘s own production of terms that will guide the reception of his work. In the case of The Ground for example, no critic can escape using the concept of “disorientation” that Rushdie provides us with. In Chapter 6 entitled “Disorientations,” he offers us a lengthy summary to his own book, which begins with: “Disorientation is loss of the East.” (176) He then proceeds to tell us about his own and his protagonists‘ movement from India to England to the U.S. “East is East, but yeast is West,” (290) he writes, and it sounds clever and catchy, but also as obscure as any advertisement slogan, from “L‘Oréal – because you‘re worth it” to “Coke – Open happiness.” Yet Rushdie‘s narrator proliferates such slogan-like phrases while he asks us, tongue in cheek, to excuse his “(post)colonial clumsinesses” (388). The successful use of what Pankaj Mishra calls “poster-bright themes” often characterizes the catchy aspects of postcolonial discourse in general and infuriates its critics: the empire writes back with the help of hybridity, interstitiality, disorient, and the like. Mishra insists that this kind of rhetoric reaches, in Rushdie‘s work, the point where homelessness ceases to be “the grievous condition it is for millions” and becomes instead a “slick metaphor for the human condition.”
<12> Rushdie‘s even more ingenious inventions, from “immigratitude” to “magnificentourage” earn him the reputation for excessive puns and wordplay, too shiny (or brilliant?) to mean much. Or he is praised for “linguistic innovativeness” (Ganapathy-Dore 25) characterized by his ability to transform language into a plastic medium and shape it, irreverently, into a creature of and for the imagination, a hybrid mutation that Mishra once saw as an infectious disease, “Rushdietis.” The fact remains that Rushdie is responsible for some of the more memorable literary phrases, some of which, like “the empire writes back,” came to designate an entire field of research like postcolonial studies. In this sense, Rushdie is skilled in creating, like the Diana that he describes, “the signs by which we might know [him] as [he] wishe[s] to be known.” (“Crash” 111)
<13> In the complex ménage à trois between the media, the celebrity and the public, the key word is “control” – a form of power over images, headlines, and their circulation. For this reason, Rushdie focuses in “Crash” on the struggle of the celebrity to flee the paparazzo even unto death and the constant efforts to snare the celebrity off guard, in the moment of revealing or degrading intimacy. Our fascination with that intimacy is only rivaled by our repulsion from it: the paradox of wanting the star to be just like us and, at the same time, to remain god-like and free of bodily limitations of any kind (including age) speaks to the fundamentally “in-between” status of the star and our contradictory expectations regarding that status. Rushdie‘s reflection on Princess Diana‘s death in “Crash” focuses on the star‘s attempt to assert her subject position and her ultimately lethal rejection of the idea that she is no more than an object for consumption:
In escaping from the pursuing lenses, she was asserting her determination, perhaps her right, to be something altogether more dignified: that is, to be a Subject. Fleeing from Object to Subject, from commodity toward humanity, she met her death. (111)
Yet again, the celebrity is a hybrid creature, stranded between worlds and roles, in this case, between commodity and humanity, and she is ultimately killed by the attempt at impossible crossing.
<14> Evoking Mikhail Bakhtin‘s famous concept “vnenakhodimost” (outsideness), Rushdie‘s narrator comments on the loss of self between parallel worlds, but also on that self‘s capacity for flexible transformations in response to the experience of dislocation:
There is this Russian word, he says. Vnenakhodimost. Outsideness. It could be I found the outsideness of what we‘re inside. The way out from the carnival grounds, the secret turnstile. The route through the looking glass. The technique of jumping the points, from one track to the other. Universes like parallel bars, or tv channels. Maybe there are people who can swing from bar to bar, people who can if you understand me channel-hop. Zappers. Maybe I‘m a zapper myself, he says. Exercising a kind of remote control. (350)
Rushdie‘s characters in The Ground Beneath Her Feet attempt this kind playful channel-hopping and, at the same time, strive to maintain some kind of remote control over their lives. Rushdie was certainly doing the same in response to that frightening example of another kind of remote control, the fatwa. His admiration for U2‘s Zooropa tour stems from the band‘s self-conscious manipulation of irony, which “simultaneously embraced and debunked the mythology and gobbledygook of rock stardom, capitalism, and power.” (“U2” 97) The question that Rushdie‘s approach to stardom cannot quite answer and that his critics justifiably raise, is whether one can ever simultaneously “embrace and debunk” the mythology of capitalism and whether the lucky zappers from the earlier excerpt truly hop channels into freedom or merely confirm the confines of the medium. Some critics point out that the ultimate impression emerging form The Ground Beneath Her Feet is that the author “has finally given in to the seductions of transatlantic mass culture” (Rollason). Others insist that, “Rushdie is now a megastar – a great chronicler of the global village” writing books about “the way we live now.” (Power) It‘s again “us,” represented by a single voice that works to convince us that we are all the same (human?) and that all our disparate voices can ultimately be contained in one image, one person, or one line. Miriam Pirbhai argues that Rushdie‘s novel illustrates precisely “the paradox of globalization” consisting in the clash between “a literal and symbolic opening up of the world to the heterogeneous cultural practices and identities” while bringing, at the same time, “hegemonic economic and cultural practices against which national and cultural entities must form their own sites of resistance.” (54) It remains unclear where exactly, in Rushdie‘s intensely anti-nationalist work, this resistance to global homogenization is supposed to reside. In response to channel-zappers, Pankaj Mishra‘s questions about the true nature of displacement linger: “expatriation to the west is a luxury few people in the “east” can afford; and […] most people there have no choice but to stay within the many frontiers they know from birth.” The hybrid, interstitial creatures may, from this perspective, be living a luxury of multiple identities and disguises simply unavailable without the privilege of money and the right kind of passport. Recently, HSBC, “the world‘s local bank,” has begun asking: “Does your money cross borders as easily as you do?” For those with no money, the question is moot. For those with the wrong kind of passport, the answer is “I don‘t cross borders at all!” So Rushdie‘s border crossing metaphor of human existence ultimately runs into a wall: who, where, when? The material conditions of our temporal and place-bound existence are not so easily resolved or transcended and the threat of death, so familiar to Rushdie, certainly drives this point home.
<15> Reflecting on Princess Diana‘s death and the condition of celebrity, Rushdie asks:
are we going to stop being fascinated by “all those purloined moments, those stolen secrets of public people's private lives that have, for more than a decade now, been the stuff of our most popular newspapers and magazines?” (“Crash” 110)
The answer he finds in The Ground Beneath Her Feet is no, we are not going to stop. The purloined and endlessly proliferating chatter of images and interpretations constitutes fame while the star herself, created and then devoured by this chatter, stands on a threshold between two worlds, our world and the underworld, embodying the greatest appeal of all: the appeal of hybrid, wavering existence, on the fault line where the possibility of transcendence ends up as a simple void. With respect to Vina, Rushdie describes stardom as victimhood:
What a piece of jetsam she was then, what a casualty! Literally selfless, her personality smashed, like a mirror, by the fist of her life. Her name, her mother and family, her sense of place and home and safety and belonging and being loved, her belief in the future, all these things had been pulled out from under her, like a rug. She was floating in a void, denatured, dehistoried, clawing at the shapelessness, trying to make some sort of mark. (121)
Vina‘s stardom is located, as all stardom seems to be, on the threshold or fault line between binary worlds—between private and public, famous and infamous, desired and resented, healthy and ill, alive and dead. The result of standing in-between, stranded or suspended between human present and divine eternity, takes the shape of a devouring earthquake in Rushdie‘s novel so that the cannibalized star is buried in the bowels of the earth itself in a perfect reversal of height into depth and light into darkness. Such reversals and paradoxes might ultimately constitute the appeal of stardom: a temporary glow made more exciting by its imminent death.
Notes
[1] In “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form” (2010), Barry King argues that, “the gradient relationship between star and celebrity, between demonstrated flair in performance and market-indexed popularity, is currently shifting. Rather than being created by stardom in some focused realm of performance, celebrity is becoming the basic condition of fame through performance.” (9) As a consequence of this shift, the notion of deserved fame of contenders “shrinks before the drive to maximize the media visibility of their names and branding opportunities that come from the intensive marketing of their personae.” (9)
[2] The song “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” (lyrics by Salman Rushdie; music by U2 and Daniel Lanois) was released in 2000 on the soundtrack for Wim Wenders‘ film “The Million Dollar Hotel.”
[3] For a detailed presentation of Rushdie‘s career as advertising copywriter, see “A Writer‘s Tale,” an article by Grainne Rothery, which first appeared in Marketing Age 2.6 (25 Oct. 2008) and subsequently in Business and Leadership on 6 Nov. 2008.
[4] The remapping of the significant stages of the Orphic myth in Rushdie‘s novel, from katabasis (the descent into the underworld) to sparagmos (the ritual dismemberment of the hero), are compellingly examined by Rachel Falconer in her essay “Bouncing Down to the Underworld: Classical Katabasis in The Ground Beneath Her Feet” (2001). Falconer offers a comparatist elaboration of this topic in Hell in Contemporary Literature (2005). I rely on her analysis in order to explore a different dimension of Rushdie‘s novel and life: the metamorphic journey and its underworld components as they relate to fame.
[5] This article was subsequently reprinted in Rushdie‘s collected non-fiction Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 as “Crash: The Death of Princess Diana” (109-112). All my quotations of this essay are taken from the reprinted text.
Works Cited
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