The story of Jonah is well known to Muslims. Indeed, there is a sahih hadith which equates Jonah & the Prophet as being at the same state of sanctity.
Remarkably, there is at least one Muslim who pretends not to know this.
45 years ago, Salman Rushdie wrote the following essay, titled 'outside the whale' for Granta
Anyone who has switched on the television set, been to the cinema or entered a bookshop in the last few months will be aware that the British Raj, after three and half decades in retirement, has been making a sort of comeback.
It had never gone away. There had been Television adaptations of Forster's 'Passage' as well as re-runs of the Korda's films starring Sabu- the elephant boy0 not to mention 'Carry on up the Khyber' & 'It aint half hot Mum'. Hollywood's 'Gunga Din' & 'Kim' too were well received. My favourite was 'Nine hours to Rama' with Robert Morley in black-face playing a Congress Minister. However, Rumer Godden's 'River' & 'Black Narcissus' had their movements. John Masters' 'Bhowani Junction' was a favourite with my parents.
After the big-budget fantasy double-bill of Gandhi and Octopussy,
Gandhi was supported by the Indian Government. Octopussy had Vijay Amrithraj but was deeply silly.
we have had the blackface minstrel-show of The Far Pavilions in its TV
which made a loss
serial incarnation, and immediately afterwards the grotesquely overpraised Jewel in the Crown.
It made Art Malik a star.
I should also include the alleged ‘documentary’ about Subhas Chandra Bose, Granada Television’s War of the Springing Tiger, which, in the finest traditions of journalistic impartiality, described India’s second-most-revered Independence leader as a ‘clown’.
The Communist Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, asked Indira to stop its release though Bose's nephew- Sisir- had contributed to it.
And lest we begin to console ourselves that the painful experiences are coming to an end, we are reminded that David Lean’s film of A Passage to India is in the offing.
Victor Bannerjee's finest performance.
I remember seeing an interview with Mr Lean in The Times, in which he explained his reasons for wishing to make a film of Forster’s novel. ‘I haven’t seen Dickie Attenborough’s Gandhi yet,’ he said, ‘but as far as I’m aware, nobody has yet succeeded in putting India on the screen.’
Fair point. There had been no Indian 'Lawrence'. Did Lean succeed? Well enough.
The Indian film industry, from Satyajit Ray to Mr N. T. Rama Rao, will no doubt feel suitably humbled by the great man’s opinion.
No. They laughed heartily at the director of 'Ryan's daughter'. Still, 'Lawrence' is immortal.
These are dark days. Having expressed my reservations about the Gandhi film elsewhere, I have no wish to renew my quarrel with Mahatma Dickie.
Coz he'd always win. He had placed Outram in Ray's 'Shatranj' & secured Indira's backing.
As for Octopussy, one can only say that its portrait of modern India was as grittily and uncompromisingly realistic as its depiction of the skill, integrity and sophistication of the British secret services.
One can only say that if one has nothing to say.
In defence of the Mahattenborough, he did allow a few Indians to be played by Indians. (One is becoming grateful for the smallest of mercies.)
One isn't becoming a prat. Once was always that.
Those responsible for transferring The Far Pavilions to the screen would have no truck with such tomfoolery. True, Indian actors were allowed to play the villains (Saeed Jaffrey, who has turned the Raj revival into a personal cottage industry, with parts in Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown as well, did his hissing and hand-rubbing party piece; and Sneh Gupta
who was the hostess on 'Sale of the Century'. Asians disliked her because they considered her too dark.
played the selfish princess, but unluckily for her, her entire part consisted of the interminably repeated line, ‘Ram Ram’).
To be fair, she wasn't a RADA graduate. She was from Kenya & pretty damn enterprising. I believe she returned to India to work with handicapped kids.
Meanwhile, the good-guy roles were firmly commandeered by Ben Cross, Christopher Lee, Omar Sharif, and, most memorably, Amy Irving as the good princess, whose make-up person obviously believed that Indian princesses dip their eyes in black ink and get sun-tans on their lips.
It sounds as though Rushdie actually watched that dreck. No one else did. By then every Indian family in the UK had a VCR.
Now of course The Far Pavilions is the purest bilge. The great processing machines of TV-soap opera have taken the somewhat more fibrous garbage of the M. M. Kaye book and pureed it into easy-swallow, no-chewing-necessary drivel. Thus, the two central characters, both supposedly raised as Indians, have been lobotomized to the point of being incapable of pronouncing their own names. The man calls himself ‘A Shock’, and the woman ‘An Jooly’.
That isn't why it bombed.
Around and about them there is branding of human flesh and snakery and widow-burning by the natives. There are Pathans who cannot speak Pushto. And, to avoid offending the Christian market, we are asked to believe that the child ‘A Shock’, while being raised by Hindus and Muslims, somehow knew that neither ‘way’ was for him, and instinctively, when he wished to raise his voice in prayer, ‘prayed to the mountains’.
Hindus can pray to the mountain- more particularly if it is Kailash, Govardhana, Arunachala etc.
It would be easy to conclude that such material could not possibly be taken seriously by anyone, and that it is therefore unnecessary to get worked up about it. Should we not simply rise above the twaddle, switch off our sets and not care?
No. We turn on the VCR & watch either Kung Fu or Porn or Porn Kung Fu.
I should be happier about this, the quietist option – and I shall have more to say about quietism later on – if I did not believe that it matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it. I should also mind less were it not for the fact that The Far Pavilions, book as well as TV serial, is only the latest in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East.
It didn't make a profit. What if inflicted was a loss on its producers. But the same thing happened with 'Zulu Dawn'.
The creation of a false Orient of cruel-lipped princes and dusky slim-hipped maidens,
sadly, our maidens tend to be as fat as fuck
of ungodliness, fire and the sword, has been brilliantly described by Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism, in which he makes clear that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism
Fuck off! Imperialism is only cool if it makes a profit.
and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic.
Nobody complained about 'Temple of Doom'. Why? It wasn't boring shite.
Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture being stereotyped;
by you.
or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to counterpunch against the stereotype.
Like Octopussy?
If the TV screens of the West were regularly filled by equally hyped, big-budget productions depicting the realities of India, one could stomach the odd M. M. Kaye. When praying to the mountains is the norm, the stomach begins to heave.
Salman's Muslim stomach begins to heave when he hears about what kaffirs get up to.
Paul Scott was M. M. Kaye’s agent, and it has always seemed to me a damning indictment of his literary judgement that he believed The Far Pavilions to be a good book.
It sold 15 million copies. That's all that matters.
Even stranger is the fact that The Raj Quartet and the Kaye novel are founded on identical strategies of what, to be polite, one must call borrowing.
Nope. They are based on writing stuff ordinary people find engaging. Kaye & Scott weren't rich & hadn't been to Oxbridge. They provided for themselves & their families by working hard & producing middle-brow literature of (in my opinion) an 'improving' or humanistic type.
In both cases, the central plot-motifs are lifted from earlier and much finer novels. In The Far Pavilions, the hero Ash (‘A Shock’) – raised an Indian, discovered to be a sahib, and ever afterwards torn between his two selves – will be instantly recognizable as the cardboard cut-out version of Kipling’s Kim.
Or Tagore's 'Gora'.
And the rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens derives just as plainly from Forster’s Passage to India.
No it doesn't. Adela wasn't raped. Daphne was- by Indians who beat up her lover. Shit like that goes down all the time. That's why you need to get a fucking hotel room if you want to get intimate with your girlfriend. Oddly, this is not the case if she happens to be a goat.
But because Kaye and Scott are vastly inferior to the writers they follow,
Everybody is inferior to Rudyard fucking Kipling. Also Shakespeare. Even my own 'Omelette- Denmark's Humpty Dumpty Prince' has not displaced 'Hamlet' on the English stage.
they turn what they touch to pure lead. Where Forster’s scene in the Marabar caves retains its ambiguity and mystery, Scott gives us not one rape but a gang assault, and one perpetrated, what is more, by peasants. Smelly persons of the worst sort.
Coz that's what actually happens in India. Peasants are horny buggers.
So class as well as sex is violated; Daphne gets the works. It is useless, I’m sure, to suggest that if a rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo-British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class…not even Forster dared to write about such a crime.
It wouldn't have been a crime. The victim was clearly a prostitute- or had become so- unless she wasn't & her family decided to keep quiet about it. Obviously, the true irony here is that hardly any Whites were killed or molested in the Forties. Millions of Indians were killed or raped during that period by darkies like themselves.
So much more evocative to conjure up white society’s fear of the darkie, of big brown cocks.
Small brown cocks. African heritage men are believed to be better endowed. That's why Tamils like me would shave our heads in the hope of being mistaken for the possessor of a giant dong. Sadly, nobody was taken in- probably because of my Peter Sellers' accent.
You will say I am being unfair; Scott is a writer of a different calibre from M. M. Kaye.
Because he has a dick.
What’s more, very few of the British characters come at all well out of the Quartet – Barbie, Sarah, Daphne, none of the men. (Kaye, reviewing the TV adaptation, found it excessively rude about the British.)
Kaye was right. She belonged to the older, Rumer Godden, generation. Indians were happy she made a lot of money by showing filial piety to her own ancestors.
In point of fact, I am not sure that Scott is so much finer an artist. Like Kaye, he has an instinct for the cliche. Sadistic, bottom-flogging policeman Merrick turns out to be (surprise!) a closet homosexual. His grammar-school origins give him (what else?) a chip on the shoulder.
It must be said, the actor playing Merrick was very good.
And all around him is a galaxy of chinless wonders, regimental grandes dames, lushes, empty-headed blondes, silly-asses, plucky young things, good sorts, bad eggs and Russian counts with eyepatches. The overall effect is rather like a literary version of Mulligatawny soup. It tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra-parochially British, only with too much pepper.
The novels hadn't done very well but the TV series was a hit. No one grudged Scott his success though his jaundiced view of the final days of the Raj was somewhat unfair. Still, Wavell himself was uncomfortable with things he was obliged to do in 1942. That is why he was determined to put an end to the Raj.
And yes, Scott is harsh in his portraits of many British characters; but I want to try and make a rather more difficult point, a point about form.
Rushdie could never see what actual point was being made.
The Quartet’s form tells us, in effect, that the history of the end of the Raj was largely composed of the doings of the officer class and its wife.
No. It tells us that the Brits had granted Provincial Autonomy in 1935. If, in 1937, the Indians could cobble together a Federal Government, the country would be de facto an independent Dominion. Sadly, the Indians couldn't get their act together and so a bunch of Brits were left in limbo for a decade.
Indians get walk-ons, but remain, for the most part, bit-players in their own history.
Nope. They had formed Governments in the Provinces. Then Congress resigned office and so a handful of Brits had to maintain a zombie regime.
Once this form has been set, it scarcely matters that individual, fictional Brits get unsympathetic treatment from their author.
This is a zombie regime. The Brits would rather have been back home repairing the damage of the Blitz, or fighting Hitler in Normandy.
The form insists that they are the ones whose stories matter, and that is so much less than the whole truth that it must be called a falsehood.
Their stories matter to themselves & their kids or other relatives. Brits can't help being British.
It will not do to argue that Scott was attempting only to portray the British in India, and that such was the nature of imperialist society that the Indians would only have had bit parts.
Why not? Scott had been a private soldier in India. He wasn't an expert in Urdu literature & Islamic law. He couldn't do very much in the way of depicting Indians for the same reason that I can't do very much by way of representing Nineteenth Century Geordie lesbians.
It is no defence to say that a work adopts, in its structure, the very ethic which, in its content and tone, it pretends to dislike.
But no such defence was offered because nobody was stupid enough to charge a work by a British writer with not being that of an Indian.
It is, in fact, the case for the prosecution.
Only if Brits can be sent to jail for not being Indian.
I cannot end this brief account of the Raj revival without returning to David Lean, a film director whose mere interviews merit reviews.
Nonsense! The guy was over 70. He had made at least 4 great films. He deserved his comeback.
I have already quoted his masterpiece in The Times; here now are three passages from his conversation with Derek Malcolm in the Guardian of 23 January 1984:
He was turning 76. Everyone agreed he was a great director. No one thought he was a Professor of Film Studies or Cultural History or 'Subaltern Studies'.
'Forster was a bit anti-English,
He was a Pacifist during the first World War. It would be fair to say he was anti-Imperialist & a great friend to Indian & Indians.
anti-Raj and so on. I suppose it’s a tricky thing to say, but I’m not so much.
Good for you. Your 1942 film 'In which we serve' raised morale. Don't apologize for fighting Hitler & Tojo. They were evil bastards.
I intend to keep the balance more. I don’t believe all the English were a lot of idiots. Forster rather made them so. He came down hard against them. I’ve cut out that bit at the trial where they try to take over the court. Richard [Goodwin, the producer] wanted me to leave it in. But I said no, it just wasn’t right. They wouldn’t have done that.
Lean is absolutely right. Forster over-egged the cake. Back then, most educated Indians knew a lot about the law. To be fair, there were other anachronistic elements in the novel. I suppose, his point was that Ronnie was a dim bulb. He mismanaged the whole thing.
As for Aziz, there’s a hell of a lot of Indian in him.
Aligarh Muslim schoolboy of a previous generation. He incarnates Akbar Illahabadi's couplet 'Payt masroof hai klerki mein/ Dil hai Iran or Turk mein ('tis but the belly makes necessary the clerk's white collar/ Our heart never forsakes Janissary & Ayatollah!
They’re marvellous people but maddening sometimes, you know…. He’s a goose. But he’s warm and you like him awfully. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way – things just happen to him. He can’t help it. And Miss Quested…well, she’s a bit of a prig and a bore in the book, you know. I’ve changed her, made her more sympathetic. Forster wasn’t always very good with women.
All this is perfectly fair.
One other thing. I’ve got rid of that ‘Not yet, not yet’ bit. You know, when the Quit India
Non-Cooperation movement. Quit India was 20 years later
stuff comes up, and we have the passage about driving us into the sea? Forster experts have always said it was important, but the Fielding-Aziz friendship was not sustained by those sorts of things. At least I don’t think so. The book came out at the time of the trial of General Dyer
there was no trial
and had a tremendous success in America for that reason.
Because 'miscegenation' was big there. It was uncontroversial in India. One of the best books about Indian Shiah Islam was written by an English woman who married a Shia intellectual back in the early Nineteenth century. (Mrs Meer Hassan Ali (born Biddy Timms) was an Englishwoman who married an Indian Shia Muslim, Meer Hassan Ali, in the early nineteenth century and authored the well-regarded book, Observations on the Mussulmauns of India (1832)).
But I thought that bit rather tacked on. Anyway, I see it as a personal not a political story.
Perfectly fair. Forster was expounding G.E Moore's ethical philosophy. He comes to the conclusion that this can be implemented in England by English people- not India even if English peeps there have some Indian chums.
Forster’s lifelong refusal to permit his novel to be filmed begins to look rather sensible.
He refused permission for all his novels. They weren't cinematic in the manner cinema was conceived in his heyday.
But once a revisionist enterprise gets under way, the mere wishes of a dead novelist provide no obstacle.
Merchant/Ivory/Jhabwallah made great versions of Forster & even Henry fucking James.
And there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is underway.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that nobody gave a flying fart.
The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain
VS Naipaul liked her. Graham Greene didn't. We are on Naipaul's side.
encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence.
Trafalgar? That was cool. The problem with the Raj was that it was as boring as fuck. Even Piers Brosnan couldn't save Merchant Ivory's 'Deceivers' (based on John Masters's novel) from bombing at the box office.
The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb.
Carry on up the Khyber came out in 1968. That pretty much killed off the Raj as a topos for adventure films in the style of Korda's 'the drum' (1938).
Britain is in danger of entering a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and posture like a great power while in fact its power diminishes every year.
Very true. Thatcher might invade the Punjab.
The jewel in the crown is made, these days, of paste.
The Kohinoor wasn't. It emerged from an Afghan's anus. That is why British Crown still is famous.
Anthony Barnett has cogently argued, in his television-essay ‘Let’s Take the “Great” out of Britain’, that the idea of a great Britain (originally just a collective term for the countries of the British Isles, but repeatedly used to bolster the myth of national grandeur) has bedevilled the actions of all post-war governments. But it was Margaret Thatcher who, in the euphoria of the Falklands victory, most plainly nailed her colours to the old colonial mast, claiming that the success in the South Atlantic proved that the British were still the people ‘who had ruled a quarter of the world.’ Shortly afterwards she called for a return to Victorian values, thus demonstrating that she had embarked upon a heroic battle against the linear passage of Time.
Sadly, she saved Rushdie from the Ayatollah's assassins. Fuck you Thatcher! Fuck you very much!
I am trying to say something which is not easily heard above the clamour of praise for the present spate of British-Indian fictions: that works of art, even works of entertainment, do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and that the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history.
This was the Ayatollah's point. Rushdie was a Brit engaging in propaganda against the great people of Iran.
For every text, a context; and the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions,
Not that huge. Jilly Cooper & Jeffery Archer were big. But Douglas Adams was the only one I can still recall.
is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain. And no matter how innocently the writers and filmmakers work, no matter how skilfully the actors act (and nobody would deny the brilliance of, for example, the performances of Susan Wooldridge as Daphne and Peggy Ashcroft as Barbie in the TV Jewel), they run the grave risk of helping to shore up that conservatism, by offering it the fictional glamour which its reality so grievously lacks.
If you aren't a shithead of the Rushdie type then you run the grave risk of not being a shithead.
The title of this essay derives, obviously, from that of an earlier piece (1940) by the year’s other literary phenomenon,
(this was published in 1984)
Mr Orwell. And as I’m going to dispute its assertions about the relationship between politics and literature, I must of necessity begin by offering a summary of that essay, ‘Inside the Whale’.
Rushdie was too stupid to understand the Biblical reference to Jonah. God wants him to tell the people of Nineveh that God will destroy the City. Jonah runs away but gets swallowed by a Whale. He returns & prophesies doom but God doesn't destroy Nineveh. Jonah feels ill used- just like the Commie who prophesies doom to Capitalism but lives on to watch it flourish as never before.
It opens with a largely admiring analysis of the writing of Henry Miller:
Coz sex is better than Socialism.
On the face of it, no material could be less promising. When Tropic of Cancer was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler’s concentration camps were already bulging….
Fuck should an American care if the Old World did stupid Old World shite?
It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter.
No such novel was written. Still, it is true that sex is nice.
Of course a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the day is generally either a footler or a plain idiot.
In the opinion of a fucking cretin.
From a mere account of the subject matter of Tropic of Cancer, most people would probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that it was…a very remarkable book. How or why remarkable?
Coz sex is nice.
His attempt to answer that question takes Orwell down more and more tortuous roads. He ascribes to Miller the gift of opening up a new world ‘not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.’ He praises him for using English ‘as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetic word. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it.’ And most crucially he likens Miller to Whitman, ‘for what he is saying, after all, is “I accept”.’
Fucking is nice. Saying 'boo to Capitalism' is a waste of fucking time.
Around here things begin to get a little bizarre. Orwell quite fairly points out that to say ‘I accept’ to life in the thirties ‘is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders.’ (No, I don’t know what a Bedaux belt is, either.)
It is a speeded up Assembly life. Orwell didn't understand that nobody says 'I accept' to life though they may say 'pardon' when they fart. On the other hand, if you say 'you farted', you are accepting responsibility for sucking the cock of every hobo in thirteenth Century China.
My point is you don't have to go to Rugby or Eton to say stupid shit- but it does help..
But in the very next paragraph he tells us that ‘precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience, Miller is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers.
Put sex into your books if you want proles to read them.
For the ordinary man is also passive.’ Characterizing the ordinary man as a victim, he then claims that only the Miller type of victim-books, ‘non-political…non-ethical…non-literary…non-contemporary,’ can speak with the people’s voice. So to accept concentration camps and Bedaux belts turns out to be pretty worthwhile, after all.
A lot of Indians assumed Orwell was some sort of agent provocateur or secret policeman because he wrote utter nonsense.
There follows an attack on literary fashion. Orwell, a thirty-seven-year-old patriarch, tells us that ‘when one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.’ At first he picks easy targets – A. E. Housman’s ‘roselipt maidens’
boys who suck cock
and Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’ (‘a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names’).
not wholly a sodomite. He swung both ways. It would be fair to say that their poems would have benefitted from more graphic depictions of red hot anal loving.
But then the polemic is widened to include ‘the movement’, the politically committed generation of Auden and Spender and MacNeice. ‘On the whole,’ Orwell says, ‘the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.’
Churchill did very well out of literature in the Thirties.
It is true he scores some points, as when he indicates the bourgeois, boarding-school origins of just about all these literary radicals,
Like whom? 'Red' Ellen Wilkinson? Atlee made her his Minister of Education. Orwell was writing about shitheads who couldn't get elected rat-catcher.
or when he connects the popularity of Communism among British intellectuals
Ellen was an actual Commie. British 'intellectuals' were stupid and useless.
to the general middle-class disillusion with all traditional values: ‘Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline – anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes.’
So could cats- if they could be bothered.
In this vacuum of ideology, he suggests, there was still ‘the need for something to believe in,’ and Stalinist Communism ‘filled the void.’
Coz being an 'Empire Loyalist' was even sillier. Rushdie misses a trick by not mentioning Orwell's previous career in the Indian Imperial Police.
But he distorts, too. For instance, he flays Auden for one line in the poem ‘Spain’, the one about ‘the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder…. It could only be written,’ Orwell writes, ‘by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally, I would not speak so lightly of murder.’
Coz Orwell was actually Jack the fucking Ripper. Auden was a limp wristed Nancy boy.
Orwell’s accusation is that the line reveals Auden’s casualness – a politically motivated casualness – towards human life. Actually, it does nothing of the sort. The deaths referred to are those of people in war. The dying of soldiers is all too often spoken of in euphemisms: ‘sacrifice’, ‘martyrdom’, ‘fall’, and so forth. Auden has the courage to say that these killings are murders; and that if you are a combatant in a war, you accept the necessity of murders in the service of your cause. His willingness to grasp this nettle is not inhuman, but humanizing. Orwell, trying to prove the theory that political commitment distorts an artist’s vision, has lost his own habitual clear-sightedness instead.
What clear-sightedness? The man had shit for brains.
Returning to Henry Miller, Orwell takes up and extends Miller’s comparison of Anaïs Nin to Jonah in the whale’s belly. ‘The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult…a storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo…. Miller himself is inside the whale…a willing Jonah…. He feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism.’
Anais wasn't preaching the Gospel of Sex in Miller's manner. He suspected she might be a bit of an artist. I suppose she was. At any rate, she actually fucked her Daddy.
And at the end of this curious essay, Orwell – who began by describing writers who ignored contemporary reality as ‘usually footlers or plain idiots’ – embraces and espouses this quietist philosophy, this cetacean version of Pangloss’s exhortation to cultiver notre jardin. ‘Progress and reaction,’ Orwell concludes, ‘have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism – robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale – or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process…simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt.’
Graham Greene & Evelyn Waugh were doing well. Orwell too did produce two readable books.
The sensitive novelist’s reasons are to be found in the essay’s last sentence, in which Orwell speaks of ‘the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.’
I suppose, Orwell & Greene & Waugh were minor masters.
And we are told that fatalism is a quality of Indian thought.
Muslim thought. Hindus have reincarnation.
It is impossible not to include in any response to ‘Inside the Whale’ the suggestion that Orwell’s argument is much impaired by his choice, for a quietist model, of Henry Miller. In the forty-four years since the essay was first published, Miller’s reputation has more or less completely evaporated, and he now looks to be very little more than the happy pornographer beneath whose scatological surface Orwell saw such improbable depths. If we, in 1984, are asked to choose between, on the one hand, the Miller of Tropic of Cancer and ‘the first hundred pages of Black Spring’ and, on the other, the collected works of Auden, MacNeice and Spender, I doubt that many of us would go for old Henry.
Nobody would go for Spender. Auden & MacNeice have a couple of memorable poems. Miller did influence Durrell- who was born in India but, quite rightly, avoided writing about that boring shithole.
So it would appear that politically committed art can actually prove more durable than messages from the stomach of the fish.
There are no such messages. Nin's porn is effective. That's all that matters.
It would also be wrong to go any further without discussing the senses in which Orwell uses the term ‘polities’.
Stupid senses. He isn't talking about the boring business of solving collective action problems.
Six years after ‘Inside the Whale’, in the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), he wrote: ‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.’
Politics was about stuff like setting up a National Health Service. It wasn't about saying boo to Capitalism.
For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell,
i.e. a stupid, crazy, paranoid liar
‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own worldview. It was an underworld-become-overworld Hell on earth.
Fortunately, the shithead died soon afterwards. Sadly, Hell isn't a real thing.
‘Politics’ was a portmanteau term
Nope. A portmanteau term is created out of two different words- e.g. smoke plus fog becomes smog.
which included everything he hated; no wonder he wanted to keep it out of literature.
He didn't. He just didn't know anything about it.
I cannot resist the idea that Orwell’s intellect and finally his spirit, too, were broken by the horrors of the age in which he lived,
that of Stanley Baldwin?
the age of Hitler and Stalin (and, to be fair, by the ill health of his later years).
He didn't live in Germany or Russia.
Faced with the overwhelming evils of exterminations and purges and fire-bombings,
He did face the Blitz & did his bit- however shit- for King & Country.
and all the appalling manifestations of politics-gone-wild, he turned his talents to the business of constructing and also of justifying an escape route. Hence his notion of the ordinary man as victim, and therefore of passivity as the literary stance closest to that of the ordinary man.
Orwell knew his Bible. He got that Jonah was deeply disappointed when God decided not to destroy Nineveh. He himself had wasted his life criticising a system which could reform itself easily enough.
He is using this type of logic as a means of building a path back to the womb, into the whale and away from the thunder of war.
He really isn't. Still, he gets that sex is a good thing. Proles want more sex. The solution is improved condoms.
This looks very like the plan of a man who has given up the struggle.
Orwell wrote a shitty essay. So what?
Even though he knows that ‘there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”,’ he attempts the construction of a mechanism with just that purpose.
Nope. He tried to enlist when war was declared but his health was too poor. So he joined the Home Guard & worked for the Beeb doing propaganda aimed at India. A patriot albeit a stupid one.
Sit it out, he recommends; we writers will be safe inside the whale, until the storm dies down. I do not presume to blame him for adopting this position. He lived in the worst of times.
He lived through Britain's finest hour.
But it is important to dispute his conclusions, because a philosophy built on an intellectual defeat must always be rebuilt at a later point.
Rushdie is too stupid to build shite.
And undoubtedly Orwell did give way to a kind of defeatism and despair. By the time he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, sick and cloistered on Jura, he had plainly come to think that resistance was useless. Winston Smith considers himself a dead man from the moment he rebels. The secret book of the dissidents turns out to have been written by the Thought Police. All protest must end in Room 101. In an age when it often appears that we have all agreed to believe in entropy, in the proposition that things fall apart, that history is the irreversible process by which everything gradually gets worse, the unrelieved pessimism of Nineteen Eighty-Four goes some way towards explaining the book’s status as a true myth of our times.
Nope. It is a reminder that 'it really can't happen here'- unless, obviously, stupid Pakistanis demographically replace the English.
What is more (and this connects the year’s parallel phenomena of Empire-revivalism and Orwellmania), the quietist option, the exhortation to submit to events, is an intrinsically conservative one.
No. Rolling back stupid Left/Liberal shite is the Tory option.
When intellectuals and artists withdraw
Nobody notices.
from the fray, politicians feel safer.
If the only thing they need to worry about is artists or intellectuals then they are entirely safe.
Once, the right and left in Britain used to argue about which of them ‘owned’ Orwell.
Sodomised him? That was a thing?
In those days both sides wanted him; and, as Raymond Williams has said, the tug-of-war did his memory little honour. I have no wish to reopen these old hostilities;
coz everybody would pound your ass?
but the truth cannot be avoided, and the truth is that passivity always serves the interests of the status quo, of the people already at the top of the heap, and the Orwell of ‘Inside the Whale’ and Nineteen Eighty-Four is advocating ideas that can only be of service to our masters.
Or mistresses. Rushdie's made him eat her shit. He keeps quiet about it for understandable reasons.
If resistance is useless, those whom one might otherwise resist become omnipotent.
No. Their power does not increase. They just don't have to use it on useless people.
It is much easier to find common ground with Orwell when he comes to discuss the relationship between politics and language.
Only if you have shit for brains. Politics is about collective action problems. It has a mathematical representation. Propaganda isn't politics. It is either marketing or mania.
The discoverer of Newspeak was
wrong. Math matters. Language doesn't.
aware that ‘when the general (political) atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.’
Because stupid shitheads think language matters. It doesn't.
In ‘Politics and the English Language’ he gives us a series of telling examples of the perversion of meaning for political purposes.
He was perverting language not for a political but a polemical- and paranoid- purpose. Had the English listened to the cunt, they wouldn't have set up a National Health Service because they would have said 'there is no such thing as a British Nation' & 'Illness is not Health' & 'Dictatorship is not Service'. As Churchill said, Labour is setting up a Gestapo State with 'Death Panels' staffed by GPs.
‘Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution are almost always made with intent to deceive,’ he writes.
Also, when people say 'Hello' what they really mean is 'Go to Hell!'
He also provides beautiful parodies of politicians’ metaphor-mixing: ‘The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.’Nobody gives a fuck about such things because language doesn't matter at all. Orwell said 'if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought'. He may as well have said 'if thought can fellate language, language can also sodomize thought while taking a dump on the tits of Hope.'
Recently, I came across a worthy descendant of these grand old howlers: The Times, reporting the smuggling of classified documents out of Civil Service departments, referred to the increased frequency of ‘leaks’ from ‘a high-level mole’.
Nothing wrong with that. A mole is a guy with a different allegiance. He reveals classified information for some purpose of his own.
It’s odd, though, that the author of Animal Farm, the creator of so much of the vocabulary through which we now comprehend these distortions – doublethink, thoughtcrime, and the rest – should have been unwilling to concede that literature was best able to defend language, to do battle with the twisters, precisely by entering the political arena.
He was stupid, not utterly mad. The political arena is about making the NHS work better. It isn't about defending Language from anal rape by Thought who is also shitting on the tits of Hope.
The writers of Group 47 in post-war Germany – Grass, Böll and the rest,
were shit.
with their ‘rubble literature’, whose purpose and great achievement was to rebuild the German language from the rubble of Nazism
It remained what it was though, no doubt, it changed under the influence of the occupying powers.
– are prime instances of this power. So, in quite another way, is a writer like Joseph Heller. In Good as Gold the character of the Presidential aide Ralph provides Heller with some superb satire at the expense of Washingtonspeak.
It was mediocre. Catch 22 is the only thing he will be remembered for.
Ralph speaks in sentences that usually conclude by contradicting their beginnings: ‘This Administration will back you all the way until it has to.’ ‘This President doesn’t want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them.’
Come to think of it, Catch 22 isn't that good. Still, it was about something interesting- viz. the US Airforce in Italy during the Second World War.
Every time Ralph opens his oxymoronic mouth he reveals the limitations of Orwell’s view of the interaction between literature and politics.
Orwell was a useless pile of shite. Still, he was a patriot & answered the call of King & Country. Adolescents like two of his novels. Why? They are short. They aren't subtlee.
It is a view which excludes comedy, satire, deflation; because of course the writer need not always be the servant of some beetle-browed ideology. He can also be its critic, its antagonist, its scourge. From Swift to Solzhenitsyn, writers have
been useless. Swift, it must be said, wrote well.
discharged this role with honour. And remember Napoleon the Pig.
Or don't. It makes no difference.
Just as it is untrue that politics ruins literature (even among ‘ideological’ political writers, Orwell’s case would founder on the great rock of Pablo Neruda),
Neruda was shit. So was Allende. Also Pinochet. Still, Chile & Argentina have more than their fair share of literary talent.
so it is by no means axiomatic that the ‘ordinary man’, I’homme moyen sensuel, is politically passive.
Nothing is axiomatic.
We have seen that the myth of this inert commoner was a part of Orwell’s logic of retreat;
We really haven't. He wrote a silly essay about some shithead. Nobody cared.
but it is nevertheless worth reminding ourselves of just a few instances in which the ‘ordinary man’ – not to mention the ‘ordinary woman’ – has been anything but inactive.
Sadly, ordinary Pakistanis weren't able to kick Rushdie's head in & claim lots of money from the Iranians for performing this service to Islam.
We may not approve of Khomeini’s Iran, but the revolution there was a genuine mass movement.
It was shit.
So is the revolution in Nicaragua.
See above.
And so, let us not forget, was the Indian revolution.
There was no such thing. Some Commies wagged their tail. They were beaten into submission quickly enough.
I wonder if independence would have arrived in 1947 if the masses, ignoring Congress and Muslim League, had remained seated inside what would have had to be a very large whale indeed.
Even Sri Lanka got it. The Imperial game was not worth the financial candle.
The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places;
Rushdie hid very successfully from Iran & other irate Muslims.
the missiles have made sure of that.
This shithead hadn't heard of fall-out shelters. Didn't he watch Dr. Strangelove?
However much we may wish to return to the womb,
Nobody wants that
we cannot be unborn.
We can die. That's good enough.
So we are left with a fairly straightforward choice. Either
be sensible & treat politics as having to do with collective action problems or
we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish
Nobody does that. Jonah is inauspicious. That's why the sailors want to dump him in the Ocean.
– for which a second metaphor is that of Pangloss’s garden
They are wholly unrelated. Johah spent three nights & days praying & repenting in the belly of the whale. Pangloss doesn't have a garden. He is a Liebnizian. Candide rejects his philosophy & decides to do something useful- viz. cultivate his garden. Rushdie was incapable of understanding anything he read.
and for which a third would be the position adopted by the ostrich in time of danger;
Ostriches don't really stick their head in the sand. They'd have gone instinct had such been the case.
or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever: we can make the very devil of a racket.
Rushdie is talking of babies. But non-babies don't soil themselves & scream their lungs out.
Certainly, when we cry, we cry partly for the safety we have lost; but we also cry to affirm ourselves, to say, here I am, I matter, too – you’re going to have to reckon with me. So, in place of Jonah’s womb,
where he did 'tawbah'- i.e. repentance
I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible.
Rushdie screamed his tits off. Then he went into hiding.
Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; in place of the whale, the protesting wail. If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.
Rushdie did toddle off to America. Sadly, he got stabbed there probably because he was wailing or soiling himself in some manner which attracted attention.
I must make one thing plain. I am not saying that all literature must now be of this protesting, noisy type. Perish the thought; now that we are babies fresh from the womb, we must find it possible to laugh and wonder as well as rage and weep. I have no wish to nail myself, let alone anyone else, to the tree of political literature for the rest of my writing life.
Geture-political. The big Pakistani baby made a ruckus but then had to run away and hide after the Ayatollah heard of him.
Lewis Carroll and Italo Calvino are as important to literature as Swift or Brecht.
Carroll & Swift wrote good English. They matter to English speakers. Calvino & Brecht were shite.
What I am saying is that politics and literature, like sport and politics, do mix, are inextricably mixed, and that that mixture has consequences.
For Jeffry Archer- sure. For Rushdie- not so much.
The modern world lacks not only hiding places,
says a dude famous for hiding
but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say, the Sandinista version that there is almost no common ground.
Dubya & the Donald make Reagan look like Mary fucking Poppins. Rushdie migrated to New York, not Nicaragua.
It becomes necessary to take sides, to say whether or not one thinks of Nicaragua as the United States’ ‘front yard’. (Vietnam, you will recall, was the ‘back yard’.)
Rushdie preferred to have an American front & back yard though, no doubt, an apartment is lower maintenance.
It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth.
That's stuff economists & journalists are better at keeping track of.
If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.
It will make no fucking difference whatsoever.
Outside the whale is
dry land- which is where Jonah gets to after he has repented.
the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history.
which, Marx tells us, is economic not literary.
Outside the whale there is a genuine need for political fiction,
There really isn't. Entertainment is all we ask for.
for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world.
Rushdie couldn't understand shit.
Outside the whale we see that we are all irradiated by history,
No. Economics is ergodic. History really doesn't matter. Those who do not learn from it are condemned to teach it or gas on about it because that's how they can make a little money.
we are radioactive with history and politics; we see that it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep.
No. Politics-free fictional universes can be entertaining. That's all that matters.
Outside the whale it becomes necessary, and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes (e.g. Zia’s Pakistan) both at once.
Pakistan was actually less of a shitshow than Khalqi, Commie, Afghanistan. Indeed, it compared favourably with Iran.
Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success.
Fuck off! You can be like PG Woodhouse or Agatha Christie or J.R Tolkein. Alternatively, you can be a prancing ninny like Rushdie.
Outside the whale is the world of Samuel Beckett’s famous formula: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Fuck Beckett. Bugs Bunny is the way to go.
This is why (to end where I began) it really is necessary to make a fuss about Raj fiction and the zombie-like revival of the defunct Empire.
It must be said, Lapierre & Collins's 'Freedom at Midnight' made Indian Independence sexy. But, it was no such thing. It was as boring as shit.
The various films and TV shows and books I discussed earlier propagate a number of notions about history which must be quarrelled with, as loudly and as embarrassingly as possible.
Rushdie was soiling himself as he wrote this.
These include: the idea that non-violence makes successful revolutions;
The Glorious Revolution, in England, featured no violence. Norway separated from Sweden without violence. After the Armistice, there were peaceful revolutions in most German states though, no doubt, in Bavaria, things subsequently turned violent.
the peculiar notion that Kasturba Gandhi could have confided the secrets of her sex-life to Margaret Bourke-White;
there were no secrets. Her hubby had told everybody he'd given up sex. Nobody thought she'd taken a lover.
the bizarre implication that any Indians could look or speak like Amy Irving or Christopher Lee;
The Pakistanis, bizarrely, chose Count Dracula to play Jinnah in the movie they financed.
the view (which underlies many of these works) that the British and Indians actually understood each other jolly well, and that the end of the Empire was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement between old pals at the club;
Nehru really was an old pal of Cripps. Atlee came to stay and showed Nehru Labour's plan for India. It was everything Nehru wanted. This happened in 1938.
the revisionist theory – see David Lean’s interviews – that we, the British, weren’t as bad as people make out;
VS Naipaul quoted Santayana 'the world never had sweeter masters'. But Niradh Chaudhuri was more adulatory.
the calumny, to which the use of rape-plots lends credence, that frail English roses were in constant sexual danger from lust-crazed wogs (just such a fear lay behind General Dyer’s Amritsar massacre);
frail Indian lotuses were in greater danger.
and, above all, the fantasy that the British Empire represented something ‘noble’ or ‘great’ about Britain;
It was great that Britain made a profit on it. It was noble of Churchill & Co. to protect it from the Japs.
that it was, in spite of all its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous.
Okay. That's stretching things. The place was bureaucratic & as boring as fuck.
If books and films could be made and consumed in the belly of the whale, it might be possible to consider them merely as entertainment, or even, on occasion, as art.
Films made by Hollywood studios were pretty good. So were novels churned out by nice English ladies who had families to feed.
But in our whaleless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Rushdie's world featured 'safe spaces', on Ivy League campuses, for post-colonial shitheads like himself. He aimed for something better for himself but then had to go into hiding. He may have lost an eye but he has the satisfaction of having lived to see his country bomb the shit out of Iran.
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