Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The New Normal

There are very few privileged stories left; all have become fair game for deconstruction and dismissal. Religious stories have self-destructed through their over-ripe pretensions to factualness. Political stories have all resolved themselves into the one story of the strong suppressing the weak. Business stories have shown themselves to be mere variations on themes of greed and self-aggrandisement. The professional stories of folk like doctors and lawyers and accountants have decayed into sterile formulae with which to justify any behaviour. Love stories have degenerated into tales of obsessive desire. As a consequence “Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.”

This is the new normal: “The true story is there’s no true story anymore.“ The “Great Instability” Rushdie’s Elon Musk-figure calls it. “There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on.” And that takes some getting used to. We have “become so accustomed to wearing its masks that it has grown blind to what lies beneath.” Scratch away the thin veneer of language and it becomes impossible to rationalise the irrational. The creepy-crawlies that lie beneath language are disconcerting until we get used to them. As Quichotte’s Sancho says watching America fly by his Greyhound window: “We are scary as shit.”

Life is more reliable, less stressful with stories that are shared and stable, stories that we can believe in. At least life is better for some of us. Not necessarily for most of us. But for those who matter, that is, for the traditional story-tellers, the authorised raconteurs of our civilisation who have been telling stories of their own superiority since Isaac and his mother briefed against Ishmael and his. Fixed stories create peace only to the extent they also create injustice. Language is the principal tool 0f injustice. It keeps the powerful in power and lets them feel justified in their power,

Quichotte is about what happens, at least temporarily, when the stories that have been taken for granted bite the dust of history. Racism becomes respectable. Intellectuals tout anti-intellectual rubbish. Thuggishness is the universal virtue of people in power. The elite can be identified by their consistently bad taste in literature. In general, the real is indistinguishable from the unreal. The real becomes so unreal that it cannot be understood:

“Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. “Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing.”

Trump and OxyContin and TV game shows and incompetent politicians are not the causes of the loss of privileged stories. They are the consequences of not knowing how to live without them. “The Age of Anything-Can-Happen” provokes people to find something solid, that is to say, a good story, to hang on to. Everyone scurries around trying to find and defend theirs as the best, the only one, that others should adopt. In a sort of literary panic “A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings... Countries fall apart as well as their citizens.”

For the moment we’re “living now in a postreality continuum.” We see “Perfectly okay people, people who were our neighbors and our staff and with whom our kids went to school, turning into mastodons overnight!” Factual argumentation is a lost art: “Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense.” In a sense, language itself has been surpassed: “the surreal, and even the absurd, now potentially offer the most accurate descriptors of real life.”

Rushdie has an interesting suggestion about where to look for salvation from obsessively competing stories and their inhumane consequences. He wants us to look to the people who know about living contentedly with contrary stories in their heads as a matter of course, the people who know that what they present to the world is a persona, a mask, which is a technique for survival, not something essential to themselves. He wants us to take note of “we, the broken people!—may be the best mirrors of our times,... we migrants.” Refugees are the future.

Of the many literary allusions in Quichotte, I think the one to John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer is central. Manhattan Transfer was a stop on the rail line from Philadelphia to New York City before the tunnel was built connecting New Jersey to Penn Station. Passengers disembarked and took the ferry to Manhattan. Dos Passos considers many of these passengers for what they actually were: internal migrants, refugees really, from America itself. These re-vitalised the city with their openness to the stories it had to tell. Migrants, wherever they are from always have the same question: “Do we belong here?” This uncertainty is what sets them on the path on which new stories can emerge.

And this question is shared not just among migrants but also with the old, who have seen it all before and recognise the stories for what they are: “In old age one becomes detached from the dominant ideas of one’s time. The present, with its arguments, its quarreling ideas, is revealed as fleeting and unreal.” In addition, who knows the difference between stories and the reality they refer to better than an author, particularly an ageing author who knows “the Author’s life was a fake, just like his book.”

Quichotte, like the original 0n which it is modelled, is a story about stories - all of them necessary, none of them true. Even very good authors, perhaps because they are very good authors, tend toward confusion so that, like the Don of Cervantes, Rushdie’s fictional author “on some days has difficulty remembering which history was his own and which Quichotte’s.” But the author, like the migrant learns to live with this confusion rather than impose his solution to it on the rest of us.

So Quichotte is the new kind of privileged story, privileged not because it is more true but because it includes so many other stories. Just as does the story of Don Quixote, an older new story. Both are reminders that no story tells it all, isn’t it.

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