Grimus
Encyclopedia
Grimus is a 1975 fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...

 and science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel written by Salman Rushdie. It was his literary debut.

The story loosely follows Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. After drinking the fluid, Flapping Eagle wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities before falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...

. He arrives in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island where those immortals who have tired of the world but are reluctant to give up their immortality
Immortality
Immortality is the ability to live forever. It is unknown whether human physical immortality is an achievable condition. Biological forms have inherent limitations which may or may not be able to be overcome through medical interventions or engineering...

 exist in a static community under a subtle and sinister authority.

Published in 1975, Grimus was Salman Rushdie’s first published novel. To a large extent it has been disparaged by academic critics; though Peter Kemp’s comment is particularly vitriolic, it does give an idea of the novel’s initial reception:

"His first novel, Grimus (1975), a ramshackle surreal saga based on a 12th-century Sufi poem and copiously encrusted with mythic and literary allusion, nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision."

Style

Amongst other influences Rushdie incorporates Sufi, Hindu, Christian and Norse
Norse mythology
Norse mythology, a subset of Germanic mythology, is the overall term for the myths, legends and beliefs about supernatural beings of Norse pagans. It flourished prior to the Christianization of Scandinavia, during the Early Middle Ages, and passed into Nordic folklore, with some aspects surviving...

 mythologies alongside pre- and post-modernist literature into his construction of character and narrative form. Grimus was created with the intention of competing for Rushdie’s then publisher, Victor Gollancz Ltd.’s ‘Science Fiction Prize.’ As an intended work of science fiction it is comparable to David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus in that there is very little actual science fiction. Rather inter-dimensional/interstellar travelling provides a narrative framework that loosely accords to the bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...

 narrative form in order to allegorically encounter and investigate multiple social ideologies whilst in a search for a coherent centre of identity. It can be seen as growing out of and extending the techniques and the literary traditions identified with Jonathan Swift's
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

 Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...

, or Sir Thomas More’s
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...

 Utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...

, in that its journey traverses both outer and inner dimensions, exploring both cultural ideologies and the ambivalent effects that they have on one’s psychological being.

Like much of Rushdie's work, Grimus undermines the concept of a ‘pure culture’ by demonstrating the impossibility of any culture, philosophy or weltanschauung existing in sterile isolation. This profoundly post-structuralist approach gains overt expression, for example, in Virgil’s comment on the limitations of aesthetic theories that attempt to suppress their own contingencies; ‘Any intellect which confines itself to mere structuralism is bound to rest trapped in its own webs. Your words serve only to spin cocoons around your own irrelevance.’ [Grimus p. 91]

Further, in Grimus the habits that communities adopt to prevent themselves from acknowledging multiplicity gain allegorical representation in the Way of K. The Way of K may be seen as Rushdie probing the Rousseau-influenced theories of man and society that influenced much post-18th century Western travel writing and the modernist influenced literature of 1930s England in particular. In light of this, we can see Rushdie as having produced what Linda Hutcheon terms a 'histiographic novel.' That is, novels that explore and undermine concepts of stable cultural origins of identity.

Like his later work Midnight's Children, with Grimus Rushdie draws attention to the provisional status of his text’s ‘truth’ and thus the provisional status of any received account of reality, by using meta-texts that foreground the unnaturalness and bias of the text’s construction as an entity. For example, Grimus’s epilogue includes a quotation from one of its own characters. Thus, the text revolves around the ‘symptoms of blindness which mark its conceptual limits’ rather than the direct expression of didactic insights.

Rushdie has argued that ‘one of the things that have happened in the 20th century is a colossal fragmentation reality.’ Hence, like Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...

, Grimus incorporates Magic Realism
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...

 in order to transgress distinctions of genres, which mirrors ‘the state of confusion and alienation that defines postcolonial societies and individuals.’

Structure

One of Grimus’s structural devices draws upon Farid Ud 'Din Attar's 'The Conference of the Birds.' An allegorical poem that argues ‘God’ to be the transcendental totality of life and reality rather than an entity external to reality. This is a fundamental aspect of Sufism, and Rushdie’s use of it prefigures his exploration of the relation of religion to reality in The Satanic Verses, Shame, East West and a number of his non-fiction works. Both narratives build towards the revelation of the 'truth' which waits atop of the Mountain Qâf. The footnote in Virgil’s diaries ‘explains’ the use of ‘K’ rather than ‘Q’, which both overtly draws attention to the narrative as a construction, the effects of which are discussed above, and in a quite dark irony prefigures the ‘Rushdie Affair’ when it states that ‘A purist would not forgive me, but there it is.’ [Grimus footnote p. 209]

The Dante Comedia provides the structure for Grimus’s exploration of inner dimensions. i.e. a journey through concentric circles and a crossing of a river in order to arrive at the most terrifying, central region. Hence, Flapping Eagle’s realisation that ‘[He] was climbing a mountain into the depths of an inferno plunging deep into myself’ and his mistaking of Virgil Jones for ‘a demon’ manifest as part of ‘some infernal torture.’ [Grimus p. 69] This manipulation of the Inferno trope, so that it acts to reveal psychological rather than empirical reality, blurs the boundaries dividing internal and external realities, which is a fundamental conceit to the novel and Rushdie’s works as a whole. Whilst the basing of Calf Island on a merger of Eastern and Western references (i.e. Dante’s Mount Purgatory and Attar’s Qâf Mountain) is emblematic of Rushdie’s locating of post-colonial identity in an eclectic coalescence of cultures.

Nomenclature

It is rare to see character names free of symbolism or allusion in Rushdie's works.

Paired characters

Kathryn Hume argues that one of Rushdie’s most effective techniques for emphasizing problematic dualistic thinking is the pairing of characters. However, with Grimus’s lack of initial commercial success and the furore over The Satanic Verses, most critics have overlooked the far more interesting exploration of religious tropes embodied in the pairing of Grimus and Flapping Eagle. Grimus representing the godhead of Islam/Sufism whilst Flapping Eagle represents Hinduism's Shiva. As is typical of Rushdie the divisions of characteristics distinguishing the polarities of this pair are traumatized and blurred as these characters are structurally and literally paired, blended and unified within the text.

Reviews of the book when first it was published emphasized its science fiction elements. The science fiction author Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE is an English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society...

 has claimed that he, Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...

 and Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

served on a science fiction book prize jury at the time which identified Grimus as the best candidate for a science fiction book of the year award, but this prize was refused by the publishers who did not want the book to be classified as science fiction for marketing reasons'.
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