This article was downloaded by: [University of Miami]

On: 24 December 2014, At: 00:55

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw20

New cities out of old ones: Catoptric

echoes and reversals in Salman
Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet
a
Vassilena Parashkevova
a
London South Bank University , UK
Published online: 20 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Vassilena Parashkevova (2009) New cities out of old ones: Catoptric echoes and
reversals in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet , Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45:4,
414-425, DOI: 10.1080/17449850903273606

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449850903273606

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Vol. 45, No. 4, December 2009, 414–425

New cities out of old ones: Catoptric echoes and reversals in Salman
Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Vassilena Parashkevova*

London South Bank University, UK

Journal
10.1080/17449850903273606
RJPW_A_427534.sgm
1744-9855
Original
Taylor
402009
45
vassilena@tiscali.co.uk
VassilenaParashkevova
00000December
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Postcolonial
(print)/1744-9863
Francis2009 Writing
(online)

A close examination of the relationships between cities in Salman Rushdie’s The

Ground Beneath Her Feet reveals their bi-vocal nature through which the text
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

problematizes notions of originality and autonomy. Here, Bombay and New York
accommodate relics/prophecies of each other, thus engaging in ongoing conversations.
The after often precedes the before, unsettling the linear flow of speech and song and,
respectively, the groundwork of origins. This article addresses the ways in which cities
reconfigure each other through an inter-urban exchange of auditory and visual echoes.
These effects, which I have termed “catoptric”, create a space for subversion as cities
hold up to each other partial, broken or inverted mirrors. Traces of songs, images and
histories vibrate across auditory membranes and prime meridians, but acquire new,
subversive resonances.
Keywords: Salman Rushdie; urban configurations; catoptrics; postcolonial travel;
identity

A strange-voiced nymph observed him, who must speak

If any other speak and cannot speak
Unless another speak, resounding Echo.
[ … ] when speaking ends,
All she can do is double each last word,
And echo back again the voice she’s heard.

(Ovid 62)

[W]e Bombayites can claim that [rock music] was in truth our music, born in Bombay like
Ormus and me, not “goods from foreign” but made in India, and maybe it was the foreigners
who stole it from us. (Rushdie, Ground 96)

The fate of the nymph Echo, punished by Juno to repeat what others have said, unable to
utter any words of her own, is echoed by the curse on colonialism’s other, deprived of his/
her own voice and destined to find expression only in and through the narratives of the impe-
rial Other. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echo is enthralled by Narcissus and she longs “to come
to him with winning words, / to urge soft pleas”, but she cannot “speak the first”. Instead,
she can only wait “for words her voice [can] say again”. To Narcissus’ “Anyone here?” she
answers, “Here!”; to his “Come this way!” she calls, “This way!”; and to his “I’ll die before
I yield to you” she responds “I yield to you”. Rejected by Narcissus, Echo withers away until
only her voice is left, “alive, but just a sound” (62–63). Yet her resounding words acquire
power and autonomy in and through the condition of speaking after: in the ambiguity

*Email: vassilena@tiscali.co.uk

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17449850903273606
http://www.informaworld.com
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 415

between original and copy she has displaced the Other’s words, making them contradictory
and strange to themselves. Echoes, or auditory reflections, split or fork the Other’s tongue,
holding up a flawed acoustic mirror to its utterances. In this sense, the echoing voice of the
nymph evokes Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, “the repetition of partial presence” or
“the metonymy of presence” that threatens the narcissistic authority of colonial discourse
(88–89, emphasis in original). The mirroring of sound, however, offers more radical, what
I have termed “catoptric”, possibilities for urban configurations in The Ground Beneath Her
Feet.
The term “catoptrics” has accumulated a series of interrelated meanings since its coinage
in Greco-Roman antiquity, when it referred to a branch of optics, the study of images, light
reflections and perspective (Lindberg 220). Medieval and Renaissance writers such as
Roger Bacon, John Dee, or Athanasius Kircher, contributed additional meanings to the
concept, including its association with alchemy. Thus, in the 17th century, various catoptric
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

devices were invented (such as the catoptric box or camera obscura) which functioned
through multiplication, substitution, inversion, or permutation (Szulakowska; Teyssot 79) –
all effects of different types of mirrors or combinations of mirrors.
In relation to Salman Rushdie’s work, I have employed the term “catoptrics”1 in order
to accommodate the ideas and devices based on the mirror principle discussed above,
which, I argue, illuminate new ways in which the city is politicized and reinvented in the
novels. Due to the plasticity of urban representation in the text, particularly the ways in
which it is informed by travel, I also employ the term “urban configurations” to refer to the
urban movements or routes that have the potential to reshuffle dominant/hegemonic
cultural-political orders or hierarchies, as well as the outlines achieved by such rearrange-
ments. “Urban configurations” aim to dissociate the city from its understanding as a delim-
ited entity, so as to concentrate, instead, on the ways in which cities spill over their
boundaries and, challenging the idea of geographical fixity, continually reconfigure each
other. Catoptric urban configurations offer the opportunity to explore the complex ways in
which cities, historical and cartographic tropes, identities and travel are reconfigured
through the various catoptric processes of refraction, doubling, inverted reflection, substitu-
tion and permutation, and intertextual echoing (see Parashkevova 2007). In Rushdie’s
novels which precede The Ground Beneath Her Feet, these processes are informed by
creative, intertextual variations on artistic methods and forms: the techniques and effects of
cinema in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses and of the plastic and visual arts in
The Moor’s Last Sigh. In The Ground, as we shall see, cities are reconfigured most notably
through the media of music and photography. In the text, the after often precedes the before,
unsettling the linear flow of speech and song and, respectively, the groundwork of origins.
Thus Bombay, as the epigraph suggests, hears rock music before the West: it is London and
New York that share Echo’s fate. Just as importantly, above and beneath and original and
copy/imitation often change places in a number of cultural, political, cartographic, mytho-
logical, physical and metaphorical inversions. Distorting mirrors, inverting mirrors, and
mirrors reflected in other mirrors recur in Rushdie’s text, resulting in the crossing and
subversion of boundaries; the destabilization of binaries; and the erasure of the difference
between urban origins and urban translations. Often such processes are carried out through
travel, both physical and imagined, through and between cities, where those who travel have
twins or shadow selves. Thus the text generates a number of what can be seen as catoptric
itineraries, based on the principles of mirroring, doubling, inversion, or metamorphosis;
these are often juxtaposed or superimposed on one other. The discussion that follows traces
this chain of catoptric associations as they bear on subjectivities, cartographic discourse and
travel.
 416 V. Parashkevova

Travel in the novel is catoptrically informed through a prominent boundary derived from
the myth of the Dioscuri. In one version of the myth, Polydeuces was the immortal son of
Zeus while Castor was the mortal son of King Tyndareos. At Polydeuces’ request, the twins
shared the divinity between them, living half the year beneath the earth, with the dead, and
the other half on Mount Olympus, with the gods (Cotterell and Storm 40). In The Ground,
it is not the periodic change of life and death, light and dark, and infernal and divine that is
highlighted, but the physical boundary between them – the ground – the ability to cross that
boundary, and, most of all, the choice of ground beneath one’s feet as opposed to over one’s
head (54). The choice of a position in the world with respect to the ground activates a pleth-
ora of meanings. Besides a mid-point between under and over, hell and the skies, Dantean
descent and contemporary celebrity worship, “ground” is also the land surface or normal-
ized level (Foucault 78). It denotes stability and gravity, as well as the firmness or truth of
a viewpoint. Yet, in the text, it also symbolizes entrapment, ties, and forced belonging, so
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

that shifting ground, disorientation, and the nausea of travelling can have a positive, sober-
ing effect on the characters.
In the text’s juxtaposition and re-appropriation of the myths of Orpheus and Castor and
Polydeuces, all of whom descend into the underworld and ascend to the surface, urban
configurations also reverberate across the catoptric boundary between over- and under-
ground, as well as across this boundary’s analogues, such as organic membranes or photo-
graphic frames, as we shall see. Thus the narrator in The Ground launches the story as
a descent into the underworld: “So I stand at the gate of the inferno of language, there’s a
barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a coin under my tongue for the fare” (21). It is a
journey past the inscription of Hell, which is designated, in the context of Dante’s Divine
Comedy, as a process of “conversion”, from the Latin “to reverse positions” as Virgil and
the pilgrim do, at the middle of Satan’s body:

Satan, falling away from God, head first and upside down, fell from the greatest height to the
greatest depth and, lodged in the physical center of gravity, formed an inverted spiritual center
of gravity, pulling down toward himself all those who, like himself, turned away from God.
But [ … ] his position forms the basis of interpretation for the pilgrim’s journey, whose down-
ward path it reveals retrospectively to have been upward, all along. (Chiarenza 54)

Rai’s narrative involves a similar conversion, whereby the position of London, a centre of
gravity within the novel’s urban cartography, corresponds to the middle of the body of Satan
in Dante’s universe, so that the characters descend from Bombay to London in order to
ascend into New York. However, the emphatically unstable border space of the urban
ground reflects the city’s invisible underworld, Castor’s realm, onto its visible surface,
Polydeuces’ realm, and projects overground figures into its netherworld. These transitions
are achieved through the alternation of journeys of descent and ascent, withdrawal into the
self, or shedding of an old self. Challenging the notions of origin or pure essence, cities are
catoptrically multiplied: they have versions or reflections in different media – myth, music,
photography, and narration. Rushdie says in an interview:

I decided that I would make a life in the West and not back in the East. I’ve always wondered
about what would have happened if I’d gone down the other road. So I’ve always had this
strong sense of the path not travelled, the road not taken, and of that shadow self, of the person
that I might have been but chose not to become. (“Salman Speaks” 224–25)

The text thus generates several itinerant characters, each of whom is multiplied. Twins and
their inter-urban journeys, their descents and ascents, mirror the diverging roads in Robert
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 417

Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, articulating a play of absences and presences. Catoptric
echoes and tectonic reverberations of the urban ground haunt and undermine the continuity
of the road taken.
This article focuses on the trips and mirror counterparts of two figures in particular, the
protagonist, Ormus Cama, and the narrator, Umeed/Rai Merchant and the ways in which
they bear on the catoptric urban configurations in the novel. I will argue that traces of old
cities and journeys linger on and haunt new ones and that the tensions between past and
present, inherent for instance in the processes of “echoing with a difference”, as the nymph
Echo does, or “echoing the future”, inform the constant construction and re-construction,
generation and re-generation of cities and inter-urban routes in the text.
Disillusioned with the chaos of Bombay, the protagonist’s father, Darius Xerxes Cama,
longs for the white-mansion England of his dreams (100), a romanticized, idyllic landscape,
to which he travels in his imagination. Darius’s scholarly paper “‘Sent to Coventry’: or, Is
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

There a Fourth Function?” describes the condition of “the leper, pariah, outcast, exile” and
urges for its necessity (150). Yet, in stepping outside the walls of his library and outside
Bombay, to travel to his fantasy of England, he ironically becomes a fourth-functional
outcast himself: “England turned against him, left him shipwrecked, marooned” (163).
Colonial echoes reverberate in Lady Spenta’s (the protagonist’s mother) journeys too. It is
she who lives Darius Cama’s dreams by marrying an Englishman and moving into his “white
Palladian mansion set upon a hill above the winding Thames” (202). The Englishman’s
name, however, is William Methwold, the residual trace of Midnight’s Children’s Bombay
and its colonial genealogy. Ormus, like Saleem, is fathered by a Methwold figure, but in The
Ground’s echoes of Midnight’s Children it is Bombay that now claims and exoticizes
England. The reality of England thus clashes with Spenta’s fantasies, as it does with
Darius’s: she dreams of a journey “in the opposite direction of Dante’s” (39) that would take
her to “the place of pure illumination, where dwell Ahura Mazda and his angels and the
blessed” (163).
Ormus’s brothers, Virus, Cyrus, and Gayomart, through whom Rushdie imagines his
own and Ormus’s shadow selves, do not erode, but, on the contrary, serve to foreground and
reassert their chosen roads. The image of “internal exile” (138) pervades all versions of the
brothers’ Bombay: the narrator sees them “as men who were all incarcerated for a time,
enclosed within their own bodies by the circumstances of their lives” (138). While Virus is
exiled in silence, Cyrus, who never leaves India, develops, instead, a criminal insanity that
fulfils the fantasy of travelling. He is a serial killer who tempts his victims with his highly
articulate and mesmerizing travellers’ tales of “glittering cities and mountain ranges like the
devil’s teeth” (137). Through Cyrus’s enticing narratives of journeying the text both
renounces stasis and warns against the fluency of the route.
Ormus and his dead twin Gayo are, in turn, a version of the Polydeuces–Castor pair.
When Ormus elapses into his so-called “cama obscuras”, or “heterotopian tendencies”, the
belief in the existence of an under-, or other-world, parallel to his own, he is with his under-
ground double: Gayo. In these visions, Ormus’s descents to Gayo’s realm take him to a
subterranean Las Vegas; he chases his brother “through that Las Vegas of the subterranean
world” or down “the Las Vegas corridors of his mind” (253). An “unknown but familiar city”
(145), subterranean Las Vegas is reminiscent of the dreamed-of city of Jahilia in The Satanic
Verses, where migrant fantasies haunt official London through Gibreel’s revelations. Yet
The Ground performs an inversion, so that it is the West, America, Las Vegas that are situ-
ated beneath the East, India, Bombay: just as Gayo is Ormus’s other, subterranean Las
Vegas is Bombay’s other, its underground twin or Castor’s self. Las Vegas is the source for
the lyrics of Ormus’s songs which Gayo dictates to him during the “cama obscuras”:
 418 V. Parashkevova

“[s]ongs from the future”; “[s]ongs with names that meant nothing in 1962 and 1963: ‘Eve
of Destruction’; ‘I Got You Babe’; ‘Like a Rolling Stone’” (183). The city thus appears to
be proleptic, in that the songs are anticipatory; yet what they anticipate is an alternative
future in which the songs of the West are but echoes of the East’s. Ormus’s music thus
disrupts both the concepts of cultural origins and the supremacy of Western popular culture:
“Just as England can no longer lay exclusive claim to the English language, so America is
no longer the sole owner of rock’n’roll” (378). At the same time, Ormus’s subsequent jour-
ney to New York, to this alternative future, is also a descent into the urban underground or
the self’s other as well as a journey across the globe. To Ormus, “it’s the West that’s exotic,
fabulous, unreal” (260). Through the choice of Las Vegas, it is also subterranean or antipodal
– a simulacrum city, which is the source of words without origin or reality – thus becoming
disruptive of Orientalist representations and hierarchies by threatening the very act of repre-
sentation. Echoes across the frontier that separates the urban under- from the urban over-
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

ground also resound across the cultural and political divides that separate East and West or
Bombay and New York on the characters’ journeys, as we shall see.
Ormus’s musical genius, as his name (a Latinized version of Ahura Mazda) denotes, is
literally the product of the union of Parsi and classical European traditions, pointing to the
cultural impurity of his home city and the similarly hybrid origins of music. Yet the name
is also a pun on Orpheus, as the text often explains, and Ormus’s travels mirror the descents
and ascents of the Thracian singer: “But chasms did open. They can and they did. They
consumed his love, stole his Vina from him and would not give her up. And they did send
him, as we shall see, all the way to Hell and back” (54). Orpheus is known as the lover who
tried to win back his beloved from the dead; the minstrel whose music enchanted all nature;
the shaman or psychopomp, regularly linked in Antiquity with mystery religion, special illu-
mination, and initiation into knowledge of the secret workings of the universe. After his
unsuccessful attempt to bring Eurydice back from the underworld, he is killed and dismem-
bered by the Thracian women. Later, Ovid, in Metamorphoses, furnishes the myth with a
further detail: after Orpheus’s dismemberment, his head is washed up on the island of
Lesbos and then buried in a temple, where it continues to give oracles, while his lyre is
preserved in a temple of Apollo. Orpheus is associated with the twins Castor and
Polydeuces through the myth of the Argonauts (he is in the crew of the expedition that sets
out to bring back the Golden Fleece). In Delphi, the Argo is flanked by the twins, who repre-
sent, symbolically, the two terms of the shaman’s voyage – this world and the beyond. A
figure on the threshold, Orpheus is privy to their knowledge and belongs to both worlds at
once (Robbins 3–15).
In The Ground, Ormus’s route echoes various elements from the history of the Orpheus
myth that inform the novel’s catoptric urban configurations. For instance, the Orpheus
cinema in Bombay and the Orpheum building in New York secure the connection between
the two cities through the continuity of mythic imagery. From the Roman Orpheus, espe-
cially Virgil’s and Ovid’s, Rushdie derives Ormus’s madness and migrant metamorphoses
(Anderson 25–29); from the Italian Renaissance Orpheus, Ormus’s image as a “civilizer”
(Warden 89); from the neo-platonic phase of the myth in Italian Renaissance visual art, the
idea of Ormus as a prophet philosopher (Scavizzi 113); and from the Romantic appropria-
tion of the myth, as exemplified by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, the Orpheus of the double
realm, who is at the threshold of the visible and the invisible, the locus of redefinition and
transformation (Strauss 142).
In Ormus’s music, Bombay is a version of ancient Thrace, where Orpheus, a master of
natural forces and producer of effects, leads wild animals from savagery to docility (Vicari
73, 19) by the power of his music: “Sing against death. Command the wildness of the city”
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 419

(Rushdie, Ground 146). Yet the Orphic mission in the novel also entails the “freedom to
reject” the notion of “home”, since “life is elsewhere” (146). The narrator explains Ormus’s
reasons for leaving his home city:

Bombay was always something of a hick town, a hayseed provincial ville, in [Ormus’s] eyes.
The greater stage, the true Metropolis, was to be found elsewhere, in Shanghai, in Tokyo, in
Buenos Aires, in Rio, and above all in the fabled cities of America. (100)

Whereas for Saladin, in The Satanic Verses, leaving Bombay is analogous to shedding an
old snakeskin, pointing towards a Lucretian concept of identity, for Ormus, leaving Bombay
foregrounds a tension between old and new cities, between the Ovidian, never-changing,
and the Lucretian, always re-beginning, selves.4 This is evident in the dichotomies in the
song of Ormus’s band, VTO (Vertical Take-Off):
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

At the frontier of the skin no dogs patrol. [ … ] Where I end and you begin. Where I cross from
sin to sin. Abandon hope and enter in. And lose my soul. [ … ] At the frontier of the skin mad
dogs patrol. Where they kill to keep you in. Where you must not slip your skin. [ … ] You must
end as you begin. Or lose your soul. (55)

Travelling away from Bombay is experienced both as a process of liberation and displace-
ment, as a Lucretian transformation of identity, “where I end and you begin”, and an Ovidian
one, “you must end as you begin”. The notion of “home” is as imprisoning as the bounds of
the body, yet the space outside its limits would teach Ormus “what it felt like to be cast out,
fourth functional, dispensable” (208).
To reach London, Ormus has to cross another organic boundary, a “stretchy translucent
membrane across the sky, an ectoplasmic barrier, a Wall” (253). The membrane model, a
concept of identity that emerges from cell-theory in 19th-century literature, science and
politics, reflects scientific fears of infection and nationalistic fears of infiltration by basing
identity on resistance to external forces (Otis 7). In Rushdie’s novel, discursive membranes
acquire material forms. Donna Haraway observes that expansionist western medical
discourse in colonizing contexts has been obsessed with the notion of the contagion and
hostile penetration of the healthy body of empire:

This approach to disease involved a stunning reversal: the colonized was perceived as the
invader. In the face of the disease genocides accompanying European “penetration” of the
globe, the “coloured” body of the colonized was constructed as the dark source of infection,
pollution, disorder, and so on, that threatened to overwhelm white manhood (cities, civiliza-
tion, the family, the white personal body) with its decadent emanations. (223)

In the novel, Ormus symbolically passes through the resistant layer between Bombay and
London, thus overcoming the discursive prophylactic boundaries placed there by empire.
This frontier, constructed by the western metropolis in its fear of alien penetration, is unset-
tled through the journey west. Although the membrane is now permeable, the passage
through it involves irreversible transformations, a metamorphosis of the self: “as he passes
that unseen frontier he sees the tear in the sky”; his body is “irradiated by something pour-
ing through the sky-rip, a mutation is occurring at the level of the cell, the gene, of the
particle” (253). Although mutations occur during the trip west, remnants of Ormus’s old
self linger on. London is defined by a Bombayite: “the excitement of England is flooding
through him, as if he were a drain-blocked Bombay street in the monsoon” (259). However,
the fluid, indeterminate, Indian-English space of the Orphic threshold echoes the fantasy of
another space. Yearning for America, Ormus thinks: “I want to be in America, America
 420 V. Parashkevova

where everyone’s like me, because everyone comes from somewhere else [ … ] the whole
lot adding to a fabulously noisy historyless self-inventing citizenry of jumbles and confu-
sions” (251–52). The passage to London thus anticipates the route to New York, which, in
turn, echoes and thus re-charts old colonial journeys. Ormus imagines that he is flying to
the New World, that the name of the plane is Mayflower, and that his fellow passengers are
the Pilgrim Children (251). He is then summoned by a passenger by the name of Mull
Standish, an echo of the British-American colonist, Miles Standish, and his pilgrim journey
to America on the Mayflower in 1620. H.W. Longfellow’s poem The Courtship of Miles
Standish is also mirrored by the role of Rushdie’s Mull Standish, who “courts” Ormus into
accepting a job at his pirate radio station by promising to help launch his singing career.
The pirate radio-station ship, the Frederica, at which Ormus serves his musical apprentice-
ship, is both a geographical displacement (as configured in the name “Mull” – a Scottish
term for a peninsula) and a temporal deferral from his destination, New York, and his goal,
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

a singing career. Aboard the Frederica, Ormus is still exiled from the “centre”, America,
New York, within what the text conceptualizes as the “peripheral” space-time of England,
the sight of the “low, dark flats of Lincolnshire” (269). The names of his fellow “pirates”,
Standish’s sons, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Waldo Emerson, echo the future, as they reflect
both the future and the past, anticipating the dreamed of, but temporarily postponed, Amer-
ica.
Ormus’s exile aboard the Frederica is an inversion of Robinson Crusoe’s exile on a
desert island. Whereas Defoe’s castaway has been seen as an archetype of the colonizer,
illustrating British expansionist policy at the turn of the 17th century, Rushdie’s migrant
travels in the opposite direction to find himself marooned in England. The vision of England
as a desert island and the exoticized, satirical image of “the pirate navy, flying the Jolly
Roger, moored on the North Sea” (263), evoking children’s cartoons of the late 1950s, such
as Captain Pugwash, inscribe England into its own colonial genre of “adventure” fiction
and caricature it.
At the same time, Ormus is ironically shipwrecked aboard a ship, an intertextual echo
of Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before. Eco employs the figure of Robinson Crusoe
in conjunction with numerous other intertexts of the cultural era of the Baroque – a time of
scientific discoveries, especially Kepler’s and Galileo’s – contributing to the loss of a
centred universe (Capozzi 172). Eco’s character, Roberto, is shipwrecked on a deserted
Dutch ship, the Daphne, off the coast of an uncharted island through which passes the 180th
meridian. He is on a mission to uncover the British attempt to find the punto fijo, the fixed
point to measure longitudes, which was sought by European navigators until Harrison’s
invention of the maritime chronometer. The only other passenger on board the Daphne, a
German Jesuit, also on a mission to find the centre of time, informs Roberto that it lies
between the island and Daphne, dividing yesterday from today and the past from the present
(Bouchard 350–51).
The invisible but constricting membrane, separating Bombay and London/New York in
The Ground, is thus a trope of cartographic discourse, as is the punto fijo in Eco’s text.
Though invisible, it physically constricts Ormus’s passage west. The ambiguity between the
permeability/impermeability of the discursive frontiers across which Rushdie’s characters
are translated is mirrored by the tension between new and old cities and journeys. The new
world to which Ormus travels, temporally and geographically, is always already decentred,
but the traces, echoes, and ghosts of old, hegemonic paradigms continue to exert their power
over him. Thus London becomes an atemporal, threshold city, a permeable prime meridian
that signals the transition from the past to the future, or, within Dante’s schema in the Divine
Comedy, as we suggested above, the point of conversion or reversal of positions. Although
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 421

London serves as a centre of gravity in The Ground’s urban cartography, its gravitational
pull is weakening. Travelling westward, Rushdie’s characters lose their East: “Ask any
navigator: the east is what you sail by. Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your
certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be” (176). In losing their East, they
are also effectively dis-Oriented/de-Orientalized. Ormus leaves the “museum [ … ] of the
British Empire” (330) and begins his ascent to New York. This logical and effortless
passage from London to New York echoes the idealized image of life in the American city
as glorified in the text’s echoes of the popular ballad A New York State of Mind (331).
Ormus Cama travels in the opposite direction to pop music, from a shared, “state-of-mind”
myth of New York to an individual experience of the city. His journey to New York takes
a popular echo of the city back to its “origin” in American popular culture, where it has
already been commodified. Further, Ormus’s route reflects his creator’s transition, firstly,
to the privileged position of those few who can afford a New York life, as opposed to a
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

contemplative New York state of mind and, secondly, to a position within the popular simu-
lacrum of this state-of-mind city. Ormus Cama is romantically borne across the Atlantic
Ocean “on a pool of light” (346). Yet, the transition to New York is once again marked by
one of his “cama obscuras”, thus problematizing the westward journey.

There is a world other than ours and it’s bursting through our own continuum’s flimsy
defences. [ … ] Imagine if [ … ] it was all a movie screen [ … ] and you can see that behind
the screen there’s a whole other set of things going on, maybe another whole I don’t know
level, or maybe another movie screen [ … ]. And beyond that movie another movie and another
and another until who can guess. (347–48)

The image of a Borgesian plurality of alternative worlds, combined with what Ormus sees
as the aggressive destruction of the boundaries between them, comes to denote, in a charac-
teristically Orphic way, the imminent collapse of epistemological stability – in a narrow
sense, for those who travel, and on a global scale, for all humanity. The unfathomable depth
of the inter-urban space brings about a knowledge that is both dangerous and liberating. It
appears to be the most critically unstable space, one that yields most easily to heterotopian
interferences, and yet also the space of higher manifestations and of the most profound initi-
ation into the invisible workings of the universe.
In a catoptric inversion, Rushdie’s protagonist travels from a Bombay in which the notion
of the remote metropolitan “essence” is perceived as a shadow, to the “pure Platonic” form
that the city of New York can only reflect and worship from a distance: New York “seems
to organise itself around [VTO], as they are the principle, the pure Platonic essence, that
makes sense of the rest” (382). This route reverses the direction of popular culture: now the
western metropolis receives an imperfect image of the Platonic ideal, unobservable Eastern
“original”, yet one relying on the semi-mythological relationship between a celebrity figure
and his consumer audience. Setting out to conquer the heights of the American city, Ormus
measures both his talent against his urban ideal and the city against the paragon of his unri-
valled musical genius. Excluding the level of the street from his exercise of narcissistic admi-
ration, Ormus sentences himself to isolation. Moreover, he is alone in the project of
“reversing” the flow of western popular culture. Once he has settled into the high-rise of the
city, the Rhodope building (reminiscent of his “native” Thrace and of his home city,
Bombay), his music, now part of the West, echoes old routes of colonial exploration, because
“where this city leads, this Rome, all the world’s cities quickly follow” (387). Ormus’s
conquest of the city mirrors Rushdie’s route into “celestial Manhattan” (387): both are celeb-
rity New Yorkers whose artistic creations travel back to their “imaginary homelands” like
Plato’s forms.
 422 V. Parashkevova

Importantly, however, Ormus’s death bridges the city’s topographical extremes, its
high-rises and the level of the urban ground. The text symbolically re-enacts Orpheus’s
“sparagmos”, or dismemberment – Ormus’s ashes are to be scattered over New York from
a helicopter: “he was a small dark cloud dispersing over the great white metropolis [ … ]
Let his ashes fall upon the city like kisses [ … ]. Let songs spring from the sidewalks and
bushes where he lies” (572). While in Midnight’s Children umbilical cords, planted into the
Karachi earth, cause the growth of defective houses, in The Ground the spilling of Ormus’s
ashes is intended to work a positive transformation upon New York, to mark the transfer of
an old to a new existence – a symbolism prominent in the Dionysian and Orphic mystery
cults. Aimed at the re-generation of the city, the dispersal of Ormus’s ashes on American
soil thus alludes to the Indian diaspora, to a metaphorical dissemiNation as well as to
Ormus’s and Bombay’s afterlives on the site of the now-renewed US metropolis. In
Ormus’s “sparagmos”, the interconnectedness of old and new cities echoes the in-between
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

condition of diasporic subjects, who at once retain certain imaginative bonds with the cities
they have left and forge others with the cities they have entered. Yet, in merging with New
York, Rushdie’s protagonist effectively transforms the city. It is New York itself that forges
ties with Bombay through Ormus’s dissemination.
The interplay of old and new in the representation of cities in the text is also fore-
grounded through the routes of the narrator, whose role echoes that of Virgil’s Aristaeus in
the Georgics:

The real hero of the poem is the keeper of bees, the “Arcadian master” [ … ] This is what
Aristaeus could do: he could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcase of a
cow. [ … ] And I, Umeed Merchant, photographer, can spontaneously generate new meaning
from the putrefying carcase of what is the case. (22, emphasis in the original)

In Rushdie’s text, the miracle of generating new cities out of old ones is performed by the
act of narration itself, which thus re-appropriates already articulated stories and cities. In
the novel, Bombay’s echoes of Dickensian London also illustrate this quality of the narra-
tive: Bombay becomes a “stenchy, pullulating London beloved of Dickens, as full of
chaos and surprises as a rotting fish is full of writhing worms” (101). The imagination of
Dickensian London thus gives rise to Bombay, which, in turn, begets new cities. Although
left behind, Bombay affects all new urban stories. The house of Rai’s family, Villa
Thracia, another echo of Orphic topography, vanishes, but “colours and prophesies [the
characters’] subsequent way of living in the world” (83). Leaving Bombay is a process
analogous to “whirling free of the mothership” (177); stepping off the map (177); and step-
ping out of the frame (203), or, equally, a rebellion against belonging as an obsession (55);
culture as a laboratory slide (95); orientation as a “scam” (176); and home as brainwashing
(177). Yet, although the “only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out
of the frame”, in “[s]tepping out of the frame, they simply cease to exist” (203, emphasis in
the original).
Rai’s photography is marked by the same tensions – between absences and presences
or between parallel worlds – as Ormus’s music. The articulation of new cities and selves
is thus also premised on the imagining or generation of new images of old cities. If
Bombay is “as essential as a limb” (247), one can also “start feeling the twitching of legs
[one] never had” (331). The narrative’s hesitation between the home city and the fantasy
of away, between ties and weightlessness, or between recollections and the fear of
memory loss, is also foregrounded in the play of traces in Rai’s pictures of Bombay. In
seeking to bring together and clash different realities, they stand for thresholds, openings,
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 423

and departures – from life, from the “real”, and from the city itself. In Rai’s photographs,
Bombay is composed of a series of snapshot departures. He proclaims himself a “photog-
rapher of exits”, varying from strangers’ funerals to “more quotidian departures”, such as
cinema audiences “emerging from dreams into the pungency of the real, with illusion still
hanging in their eyes” or “narratives, mysteries, in the come and go at the doors of great
hotels” (212–13). Images of liminal, border space-times pervade his vision of the city.
The space of the urban contains the fantasy of its own absence, the idea of an end or an
exhaustion of urban potential. It is replaced by a multitude of passages to the space and
time outside itself, by the imagination of away. Having learned “the secret of becoming
invisible, of disappearing into the work” (213), Rai symbolically fulfils his fantasy of
departure. In a famous French photographer’s pictures of the Bombay earthquake, it is as
if the city itself yearns to break loose:
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

The heavens were full of dying kites, kites nosediving towards the earth [ … ], kites being torn
to shreds by the boiling winds and by the Dionysiac madness of their sudden freedom, that fatal
liberty acquired in the midst of catastrophe and then stolen away again, almost at once, by the
inexorable gravitational pull of the cracking earth below; the famous image “Earthquake
1971”, in which the tearing mid-air explosion of a single kite tells us everything about the
unseen mayhem below. The air becomes a metaphor for the earth. (218–19)

It is only in the carnivalesque chaos of the earthquake that the urban ground escapes the
fixity of location, which is now seen not only as imprisoning but also as fatal. When leaving
Bombay, Rai flees for his life until he finds himself “right here in Manhattan” (519). His
pictures of the American city, however, like those of Bombay, foreground duplicity, seeking
thresholds and juxtapositions. He becomes interested in double exposures, the supernatural,
and the transcendental. He invents an alter ego, “an enigmatic Mitteleuropean photographer,
named Moosbrugger [ … ] prowling the streets of New York looking for echoes in this New
World of Vienna, of Budapest, of Prague”, photographing “the love affairs of gargoyles”,
that are reminiscent, at once, of “the knights of Charlemagne” and “the American pioneers”
(447). Moosbrugger’s New York foregrounds the now exoticized narratives of European
violence and conquest. It is thus Rai’s shadow-self who reveals New York’s other, dark
subconscious side – one that resonates with echoes of the old continent – of the psychopath
prostitute-murderer Moosbrugger in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities; of fin-de-
siècle Vienna, exemplifying the precariousness of imperial power, dynastic allegiance and
European civilization and simultaneously reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalysis, with its
own dream narratives of suppressed desires, split egos, and dualisms of same and other, of
sanity and madness, of fantasies and latent meanings threatening to engulf the conscious
mind. At large in New York, Moosbrugger captures in photographs these lingering traces of
European myths and histories.
The catoptric urban configurations in The Ground, then, reveal the cities’ bi-vocal
nature through which the text problematizes notions of originality and autonomy. Bombay
and New York accommodate traces/prophecies of each other, thus engaging in ongoing
conversations. The inter-urban exchange of musical and visual echoes creates a space for
subversion as cities hold up to each other partial, broken or inverted mirrors. Traces of
songs, images and histories vibrate across auditory membranes and prime meridians, but
acquire new resonances. Bombay, like the nymph Echo, brings back to itself the sounds of
Western popular music in ways that problematize their origin and exoticize the West. Ulti-
mately, however, it is New York or the New World that echoes and re-articulates the
fictions of the old continent. Yet it does so imperfectly, thus pointing both to the inescapable
tension between mirroring as repetition and mirroring as subversion, between old and new,
 424 V. Parashkevova

and to the danger of reinstating and consolidating rather than empowering old absences,
aporias, and othered selves.

Note
1. The Satanic Verses offers two ideas of metamorphosis to inform the notion of migrant identity.
In the Ovidian one, identity is an immutable essence – we are “still the same forever, but [we]
adopt in [our] migrations ever-varying forms”. The Lucretian one is of constant mutability: the
old self must die for the new one to be born. Saladin embraces this, since a “being going through
life can become so other to himself as to be another” (288, emphasis in the original).

Notes on contributor
Dr Vassilena Parashkevova is the Bibliogrphy Editor of Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the
Assistant Editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection. She has taught contemporary fiction and critical
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014

theory at London South Bank University and postcolonial literature at University of Southampton and
has published on Indian and Indian diaspora writing, focusing on cities, diasporic subjectivities and
travel.

Works cited
Anderson, W.S. “The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid.” Orpheus: The Metamorphosis
of a Myth. Ed. John Warden. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. 25–50.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Bouchard, Norma. “Whose ‘Excess of Wonder’ is it Anyway? Reading Umberto Eco’s Tangle of
Hermetic and Pragmatic Semiosis in The Island of the Day Before.” Reading Eco: An Anthol-
ogy. Ed. Rocco Capozzi. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 350–61.
Capozzi, Rocco. “Metaphors and Intertextuality in Eco’s Neo-Baroque Narrative Machine: The
Island of the Day Before.” Rivista di Studi Italiani 14.4 (1996): 165–89.
Chiarenza, Marguerite Mills. The Divine Comedy: Tracing God’s Art. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Cotterell, Arthur, and Rachel Storm. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Hermes,
1999.
Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Juridical Forms.” Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. 1994.
Trans. Robert Hurley. Ed. James D. Faubion. Vol. 3. Penguin: London, 2000. 1–89.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association,
1991.
Lindberg, David C. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago and London: U of Chicago
P, 1976.
Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. London: Picador, 1995.
Otis, Laura. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and
Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A.D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Parashkevova, Vassilena. “’Turn Your Watch Upside Down in Bombay and You See the Time in
London’: Catoptric Urban Configurations in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 42.3 (2007): 5–24.
Robbins, Emmet. “Famous Orpheus.” Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth. Ed. John Warden.
Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. 3–23.
Rushdie, Salman. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. 1999. London: Vintage, 2000.
———. “Salman Speaks.” Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Ed. Michael R. Reder. Jackson: U
of Mississippi P, 2000. 216–27.
Scavizzi, Giuseppe. “The Myth of Orpheus in Italian Renaissance Art, 1400–1600.” Orpheus: The
Metamorphosis of a Myth. Ed. John Warden. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. 111–62.
Strauss, Walter A. Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1971.
Szulakowska, Ursula. The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical
Illustration. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 425

Teyssot, Georges. “Baroque Topographies.” Assemblage 41 (2000): 79.

Vicari, Patricia. “Sparagmos: Orpheus among the Christians.” Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a
Myth. Ed. John Warden. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. 63–83.
Virgil. The Eclogues. The Georgics. Trans. C. Day Lewis. Introduction and Notes by R.O.A.M.
Lyne. Oxford: Oxford UP: 1983.
Warden, John. “Orpheus and Ficino.” Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth. Ed. John Warden.
Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. 85–110.
Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 00:55 24 December 2014