Is world literature desirable? It was Goethe who first spoke of world literature, but its existence is quite recent; it was born with modernism, and now flourishes darkly in an age of post-modernism. When writers became exiles or ?migr?s, when they began to write in their second or even third languages and, above all, when the experience of this displacement became the subject of their work, then world literature was born, for better or worse. Salman Rushdie is the purest example of this negative liberty-literally homeless, he writes about the actual and figurative centrifuges of modern life. Infamous as a writer to millions who have never read him, Rushdie is ambiguously celebrated by thousands who cannot read him, or who find him unreadable because of the ambitious difficulty of his rare novels, which appear more or less like Five Year Plans. The books are international language-lakes in which swim delightful hybrids and odd schools of syntax. Like the Portuguese novelist Jos? Saramago (who, like Rushdie, has offended one of the monotheisms), WG Sebald and Roberto Calasso, all of whom produce balloons of “world literature,” Rushdie’s importance lies in his fruitful impatience with conventional narrative, his apparent belief that the novel is not limited by its distinguished genes.
In fact, the Greeks created the first world literature, when they expanded their world into universal myth. Rushdie has championed Roberto Calasso’s work on Greek and Indian myth-he has, clearly, read Calasso with greedy care-and his new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, moves smilingly between various mythologies: Greek, Indian and the easier mythology of contemporary celebrity. Rushdie’s novel, among much else, is the biography of two rock stars, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama; it tells the story of their love for one another, and their near-deification during the 1970s and 1980s, when, as the founders of a band called VTO, they became the most famous rock ‘n’ roll act in the world. This tale is told by Umeed Merchant, a photographer who has loved Vina since they were children, and who watches in anguish as Ormus snatches Vina away.
But the novel is also saturated in Greek and Indian myth, and it pays dues to Homer, Virgil and Ovid: the story of Vina and Ormus is in part the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, because Ormus descends to a kind of hell, and loses Vina at the end. And Vina is in part Helen, over whom men start battles, and in part Persephone, lured by her father’s brother to the underworld. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a novel of mythology about mythology, which asks us to compare new myths and old ones, and to test each for their groundedness.
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