Salman Rushdie, “Firebird’s Nest”.

Points to consider:

Basics:
1. What is the setting of the story (time, what kind of place) – try to gather and list as many details as is possible.
2. The visual and the sensual. What is the possible role of colours and smells in “The Firebird’s Nest”? Can you ‘see’ the story? Can
you ‘smell’ it? ‘Taste’ it? Any evidence for it?
3. Who are the two main characters in the story – what is different about them, what attracts them to one another, is it possible to see
anything similar in then?
4. Find instances where the setting is described – what are the sentences like then and what is their effect? Do any of these instances
sound especially captivating for you?

Narration:
5. How is “The Firebird’s Nest” told (technically and narratively? Anything peculiar about it? Oneiric? Where can you find evidence for
it? The past and the present, India and America intertwined and overlapping – can these be among the evidence?
6. Can people “live” in stories (btw, what happens when we exchange “stories” for “myths”)? What happens if we view “The Firebird’s
Nest” as a story on telling stories, on how they are told?
7. How do people become stories (pp. 232, 235)? What is the sense of it in “The Firebird’s Nest”?

Clash (?) of cultures:

8. “The Firebird’s Nest” as a story on how cultures see each other? A post-colonial perspective? Is it possible to say anything here about
the role of cultures here?
9. If it is a story about the culture clash does Rushdie offer any hope about it? (think of the symbol of the firebird and the pregnancy)
10. (Mis)Understanding in “The Firebird’s Nest”? Between whom? Hope or hopelessness? Contact or loneliness?
11. The failure of the relationship between people / myths / images – is it a narrative of a misunderstanding, “being trapped in metaphors”
(p. 245)?
12. “Orientalism” in the story – a European fascination with the East/with India. Do you think it is essentially reductionist (what does it
reduce the East/India to?)?

Symbolism, femininity/masculinity and psychoanalytical readings:

13. Dreams in “The Firebird’s Nest.” Are they there? In what sense? Their role?
14. The story of desire? Desire of what? Falling in love / fascination / infatuation – with stories / myths / narratives / people?
15. Timelessness / agelessness in the narrative. Cyclicity of events (cf. the image of the ruined arch). The past as the present, the present
as the past in “The Firebird’s Nest.”
16. The symbols in “The Firebird’s Nest” – what are they (fire, water, land, dance, ruins, the firebird etc.)? Metaphors permeating the
story.
17. “The Firebird’s Nest” as a tale of fear? Whose fear? Why fear? The fear of what? “The story is closing around her…” (p. 240)
18. “The Firebird’s Nest” as a story on how men / women see each other? Is it possible to say anything on the roles of sexes here?
19. Why the firebird’s nest? What is the point of the motto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses? Why will “her own shape continue to change”
(p. 247)?

Consider and comment upon the following fragments (page numbers in brackets):

1. (231) An apt way for a farmer to die: to be eaten by his land.

Women do not die in this way. Women catch fire, and burn.
2. (232) The American bride intuitively feels that she has passed into the place where that which is abolished is the truth, and it is the
government far away in the capital, that is the fiction in which nobody believes.
3. (233) It is no quarry. It is a reservoir.
4. (234) She is rich. She is the fertile land; she will bring sons, and rain. [She is America.]
5. (235) She is becoming a story the people tell and argue over. Travelling towards the palace, she is too aware of entering a story.
6. (235) A ruined gateway stands in the wilderness, an entrance to nowhere. A single tree…lies rotting beside it.
7. (236/237) America. Once upon a time in America... My country is just like yours… Big turbulent and full of gods.
8. (238) We dream of other dimensions, of paranoid subtexts, of underworlds, because when we awake the actual holds us in its great
thingy grasp and we cannot see beyond the material, the event horizon.
9. (239) It is you who have made this happen… in this ruined place you have conjured this illusion. … We impoverish ourselves to make
you happy. ... This Arabian night is an American dream.
10. (240) She dreams of a movie she has always loved… (and contd.)
11. (240) In her mind’s eye the story is closing around her, the story in which she is trapped…
12. (241) When did it happen? In before time.
13. (245) Do not condescend to us in your heart, Miss Maharaj replies. Do not mistake the abnormal for the untrue. We are caught in
metaphors. They transfigure us, and reveal the meaning of our lives.
14. (246) The dance class pours through the archway… She has that feeling again: of passing through an invisible membrane, a looking
glass, into another kind of truth; into fiction.