I also struggled with this book until I came to the conclusion that I had three choices: (1) give up on the book, (2) plod through it miserably, or (3) read enough secondary material to have a framework in which to at least partially understand what I was reading and the author’s intent. One of the chief obstacles for me was that the story kept changing. Just as I cared about a story…Presto Change-o!...I was in another story.
This quote from a Rushdie interview helped:
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“… the book itself was conceived as one which constantly metamorphosed. It keeps turning into another kind of book. Certainly, from my point of view, that was technically one of the biggest gambles. Because I couldn’t be sure that the readers would come along for the ride. It was something which could be irritating. Imagine that you’re reading a certain kind of book and you’re suddenly stuck with another kind of book. “Rushdie: “Interview,” p. 58.
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Exactly. So in order to continue I had to accept that change is part of the story.
I was on page 252, 50%, when I was riveted by this paragraph:
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‘Question of mutability of the essence of the self,’ he began, awkwardly, ‘has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great Lucretius tells us, in De Rerum Natura, this following thing: quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante. Which being translated, forgive my clumsiness, is “Whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers,” – that is, bursts its banks, – or, maybe, breaks out of its limitations, – so to speak, disregards its own rules, but that is too free, I am thinking … “that thing”, at any rate, Lucretius holds, “by doing so brings immediate death to its old self”. However,’ up went the ex-schoolmaster’s finger, ‘poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: “As yielding wax” – heated, you see, possibly for the sealing of documents or such, – “is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls,” – you hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal essences! – “Are still the same forever, but adopt in their migrations ever-varying forms.” ’ He was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the old words. ‘For me it is always Ovid over Lucretius,’ he stated. ‘Your soul, my good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted this presently varying form.’
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I’d been pondering the nature of good and evil because of a preoccupation with the last season of the television series Breaking Bad, an obsession I share with a fair portion of the American population. This fact has nothing to do with this book or this thread, but it explains my sudden intense interest in this theme throughout the remainder of the book.
In the interview cited above, Rushdie says of Ovid's Metamorphoses:
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It’s one of my favourite books and after all this is a novel about metamorphosis. It’s a novel in which people change shape, and which addresses the great questions about a change of shape, about change, which were posed by Ovid: about whether a change in form was a change in kind. Whether there is an essence in us which survives transmutation, given that, even if we don’t change into, you know, cloven-hoofed creatures, there is a great deal of change in everybody’s life. The question is whether or not there is an essential centre. And whether we are just a collection of moments, or whether there is some kind of defining thread. The book discusses that, I think, it uses the idea of physical metamorphosis in order to discuss that. And so, of course, Ovid was important.”
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Metamorphosis happens throughout this book, most significantly as Gibreel Farishta becomes an angel and Saladin Chamcha becomes the devil. But this post is now too long. This is a theme I would like to see discussed and I’ll likely have a good deal to say about it. But now I must read Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
A second theme that fascinates me is the experience of the migrant, which is also a metamorphosis. But there will be time enough in this thread for that.