Mélanie Heydari-Malayeri, ““Bastardizing” The Conference of the Birds in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 34. The fat, pedantic, and stubbornly reclusive Virgil is an infinitely more attractive and seductive character. In Grimus, the metaphor of love is literalised in Flapping Eagle’s physical “unions” with Irina and Elfrida. In Palimpsestes (1982), a comprehensive survey of the different modes of intertextuality based on the differing formal relations between texts, the French theorist gives a transhistorical definition of parody. Salman Rushdie’s celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago.

Even those who are not dedicated SF readers cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is something “off” about its treatment of conformity. Together with eighteen full-lengths these portraits illustrate the genealogy of the royal house of Scotland from Fergus I (who ascended the throne in 330 BC) to James VII (who abdicated in 1689). Rushdie has a strong predilection for non-conformity: the intellectual responsibility of individuals to move beyond the myths of their culture, to decisively not know their place and to rely on their own understanding over the myths of the past. While this is a typical theme in SF literature (humanity travelling to distant suns, and making their home on other planets), it is also a major theme in Salman Rushdie literature.This erroneous spelling is compounded by the fact that Rushdie has anglicized the letter and transformed it into “Calf”, a scarcely recognizable travesty of the original letter!

Grimus certainly occupies a unique place in Salman Rushdie’s literary production, owing notably to its ahistorical quality, which makes it more difficult to grasp the author’s intent: “it is less immediately apparent what the reality is that Rushdie is seeking to smash, and why it is that he wishes to smash it” (Teverson 112). This passage stresses how obscenely irrelevant Virgil is (the fact that he is deeply wounded by such an implication on the Gorf’s part proves that he is not impervious to blame, as he should be). They told him not to sacrifice himself so foolishly and for such an impossible aim, but he […] told them that since his heart was given to the flame forever, nothing else mattered” (131).

For a first novel, however, Grimus is still a major accomplishment, and remains one of my favourite of Rushdie’s books (more so than the to-my-mind over-rated Satanic Verses but nowhere near the genius of Midnight’s Children) although Rushdie himself has no high opinion of it. Through a parodic transcontextualization that is foremost an act of translation from the realm of the absolute to the precarious space of the fictional, the author opens up a reinterpretative space, playfully subverting the authority of the canon. The symbol of the mirror is therefore subverted, since it does not stand for osmosis but sheds light on the proliferation of doubles. Thus, Flapping Eagle’s conformity is hidden under a surface of non-conformity as he travels the course that Grimus has set for him, the course of a continually alienated outsider who is always trying to fit in to whatever society he happens to be in at the time. In fact, the undetermined topography of the novel – an imaginary island situated somewhere in the Mediterranean, straddling the West and the East – reveals Grimus to be a literary experiment, in compliance with the traditional function of islands in literature as experimental laboratories.

The story loosely follows Flapping Eagle, a young Native American man who receives the gift of immortality by drinking a magic fluid.As many critics have noted, Grimus shares the outstanding features of the Menippean satire – notably its commingling of jarring genres, “presented at various distances from the ultimate authorial position, that is, with varying degrees of parodying and objectification” (Bakhtin 118) and its propensity to digress gratuitously into pornographic situations. 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: [1] "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. This is highlighted by a shift in periphrases, from “the fat, blinking man” (120) to “a bruised man” (132), in which the indefinite article stresses Virgil’s sinking into anonymity. While the motif of the mirror plays a symbolic role of paramount importance in Attar’s masterpiece, where it stands for the indwelling of God in man, Rushdie takes this motif at face value (it is no coincidence that every window in “Grimushome” is also a mirror), shattering Attar’s concept of immanence into smithereens. The whole poem relies on a play on the word Simurg, which expresses the crucial Sufi concept of immanence, according to which reality is the knower, the known and the process.

Both real and legendary, their purpose was to proclaim the authority of the Stuarts as divinely appointed rulers of Scotland. Further in the novel, he dances the ecstatic sama, a dance typical of Sufi brotherhoods, to heal the first rift in Flapping Eagle’s psyche. The repeated use of the conjunction “but” and the binary rhythm create sharp contrasts which enhance the character’s absolute mediocrity. With Grimus, Rushdie composes a distorted reflection of The Conference of the Birds, magnified by a casual allusion to the misshapen birds which people “Grimushome” at the end of the novel, and indulges in a methodical, flippant undercutting of Attar’s epic poem. Philosophers, prostitutes, hunchbacks, ghosts, frog gods and tons of people crop up during the novel and they all leave an impact on Flapping Eagle's psyche but drag him into the weirdness of Calf Island and change his destiny.De Wet’s iconographic scheme was based on well-known chronicles of Scottish history by the Renaissance humanists Hector Boece (Scotorum Historiae, 1527) and George Buchanan (Rerum Scoticarum Historia, 1582). At Grimus Ski Centre we offer custom boot fitting and modifications in our "Masterfit" boot fitting centre . Love which is inspired by passing beauty is itself fleeting” (64) – Grimus replaces mystical fusion with sexual intercourse. I enjoyed thinking about the issues he raised and loved seeing the parallels with other works of literature. The title of the novel articulates these striking interrelations between same and other, insofar as, although a word and its anagrams contain the same letters, an anagram is also a distortion (Parameswaran 58).