Myths and cultural yesteryear of India has been a favorite pick of Salman Rushdie partially because he has a tenuous nexus with his land which gives enormous springs to his ideas and fancy and partially because India asa major literary topic helps him win the favor of his western audience by providing to their oblique wonder about Indian ethos. As a literary scheme he mixes the fiction of his head with the stuff picked up from the yesteryear for for giving such an history of life as may both relevant and uncovering to the modern-day reader.
In other words. his linking of the fabulous or cultural yesteryear with the life present makes his composing a mythocentric historiographic metafiction. The Firebird’s Nest is one of Rushdie’s recent short narratives published in the eight volume of New Writings ( 1999 ) . an anthology of the best in modern-day literature. Conceived in the fabulous image of the Phoenix. as the rubric reflects. and the Ovidian footings of metabolism. as the epigraph reads. this narrative explores the fabulous. hystorical. economic and socio-cultural aspects of modern-day life through two dominant metaphors. rain and fire.
Rushdie has chosen these metaphors for their elemental nature that lends them infinite association with the corporate unconscious nature of human race. The narrative opens with a description of drouth which has engulfed the full sphere of deluxe province ( rains have in turn failed its thick woods and singing birds ) and has turned into a dying topographic point. a barren. coercing both adult male and animate being to migrate and seek H2O. the life giving component. Staggering cattle move to the South and E while the Prince. now merely Mr. Maharaj after the abolishment of baronial privileges. moves to America in hunt of good luck.
The narrative progresses with the return of Mr. Maharaj with this American bride in a limousine drive to his crumpling castle now six hundred twelvemonth old. a practical ruin of a Gothic novel. She has been described as a “rich” and “fertile land” that will convey both “sons” and “rain” . She is a “rainmaker” capable of uniting “capital” with “idea” and raising up “monetary nourishment” for any undertaking. She had joined the enterprising Maharaj while he was researching possibility of economic rainfall. Thus H2O or rain becomes a metaphor of endurance in the sotry.
Rushdie has intensified the sarcasm of life by demoing that “cascades of cherished H2O flow ceaselessly” in the castle while the remainder of the land is deceasing for a bead of H2O. Prince’s gluttony is his subjects’ dearth. Peoples assemble in big figure at the castle spring to make full their hurlers. Even though those people who consider the American bride a “barren woman” whose “breasts are dry” for she embodies drouth and hence will convey “despair and gloom” to the part. Rushdie has made the necessity of rain metaphorically more marked.
American bride the glamor and strength of his deluxe heritage Mr. Maharaj displays the aura of his Highness by ask foring very important persons and Lords to dinner by moonshine and set uping an extravaganza of Equus caballus race. camel fury. dancing. vocals. fire works in her award. But his attempt to animate the scintillating admiration of his lost “magic kingdom” proves to be his economic mishap which he admits in his reaction to his bride’s instruction: “is this how you relax every dark? ” “We impoverish ourselves to mnake you happy. How can you conceive of that we are able to populate like this?
We protect the last fragments of what we had. and now. you please you. we plunge deeper in debt. We dream merely of endurance ; this Arabian dark is an American dream. ” This economic facet is intertwined with the issue of cultural hit in the narrative. The American bride is faded with the job of homogeneousness. the job of taking life harmonizing to a usage she ne’er anticipated. She has to refashion her place in an foreigner environment where she feels she has lost waies as symbolized by the disappearing of railroad paths in her favorite film that recurs in her dream.
The images of “burning bridges” and “burning boat” in her dream suggest the loss of links with her old life and besides cast apprehensivenesss about her destiny for she feels trapped in a universe of phantasies where the thought of connubial cloud nine is fraught with dangers of bride combustion. a societal malady that makes the metaphor of fire in the narrative more redolent. The sacrifical immolation of a adult female laborer in her ruddy saree in “the amphitheater of the dry H2O hole” trusting for a good rain is another aspect of this fabulous narration.
The metaphor of rain here joines the metaphor of fire. Rushdie describes adult females in general and the “demure” 1s in peculiar as animals of ardent bosom and dressed in the colors of fire. Rushdie’s preference for sarcasm converges both on the superstitious notions and the allied inevitableness of the destiny of wman who. he describes. is most combustible for she burns every bit easy as a piece of paper and gets lost in the sky as apuff of fume. His torment over the dehumanisation of society is more than obvious.
He aslo irects his satiric choler against gender prejudice. Rushdie shows that work forces may be eaten by their land that opens its jaws. the broad “cracks” . during drouth but adult females die otherwise: ”they catch fire and die” . In the bitterly ironical statement there is a clear inversion of the ancient myth about Sita’s endurance in fire and her entry to the Earth in “The Ramayana” . This inversion has been used to qualify both the rage of nature and the hapless province of adult female in the modern-day society. a tragic transmutation.
The principle of metabolism has been farther expounded through the narrative withing the narrative which metaphorically accentuates the societal immorality of bride combustion and mythically demonstrates the outgrowth of life from decease. Miss Maharaj. the 60 twelvemonth old fierce looking spinster sister of Mr. Maharaj narrates to the American bride of her brother the atrocious narrative of a mammoth fabulous prince of that land who had married a terpsichorean of unfading beauty. Old age frailties gripped the prince but his bride. even at 50. looked a adult female of 21.
The prince suspected his bride of taking lovers and later developed sexual green-eyed monster that led him to put his garrison on fire in which both of them died. Merely their kids survived: a girl who became a terpsichorean and a boy who grew into a sportswoman. It was said that the old prince himself was metamorphosed into a “giant bird” composed wholly of fires and had burned his bride. Since so the same scarlet tanager has been looking from clip to clip to fire other bride’s at their husbands’ case by ‘brushing their organic structures with his malevolent wings” . Miss Maharaj tells her that even Mr.
Maharaj. though a adult male of modern mentality. was every bit incapacitated in this respect because all were bout to the metaphor of fire. Her inquiry: “do you know ho many brides has he had? ” terrifies the American bride to her castanetss. Looking at her organic structure she says “you have a strong organic structure. . younger. but in other ways so unlike mine” . When the American bride is kiping. she sits by her side and mutters: “yes. a all right organic structure. it could hold beena dancer’s. It will fire good. ” Besides. she besides describes how a princess late commited self-destruction by “drinking fire” . she crushed her heirloom diamonds in a cup and gulped them down.
Since the chitchats about the fable support combustion throughout the narration the whole atmosphere looks ghostly. The terror and obfuscation of the American bride ends merely when the enigma of the fable gets blasted. Miss Maharaj. following her confrontation with her brother divulges the secret. “I am the firebird’s nest” and so turns into fires like Phoenix. the fabulous bird. However she does non lift once more. Alternatively the organic structures of the other terpsichoreans who were besides old maids typifying sterility of dry Earth like Miss Maharaj. explosion and H2O pours out submerging the scarlet tanager and it’s nest.
The full “drought hardened land” gets flooded and the part gets “cleansed of its horror” . The faery looking terpsichoreans metamorphose into their normal egos and the beat of dance turns into the moving ridges of fluxing H2O which symbolizez the regenerative energy of nature. The narrative eventually closes on a note of synthesis as suggested by the American bride’s “caressing of her swelling womb” and thought that “the new life turning within her will be both rain and fire” . The metaphors of rain and fire therefore going experiential.
The Firebird’s Nest” is. hence. a fictionalisation of the myth of Phoenix. It makes an enquiry into the niceties of Indian life and suggests extremist transmutation for salvation from its psychotic beliefs. The American bride’s captivation about the magnificences of princely India has served as a narrative scheme and Rushdie. excercising fullo freedom of imaginativeness. has skilfully interwoven world and phantasy. history and chitchat in the texture of his narrative utilizing the fabulous manner of groking world. a manner most favoured by James Joyce or TS Eliot.
He has used the shade component as technique of love affair to grok the fabulous yesteryear every bit good as to ordain the construct of metabolism because the enigma about the firebird’s nest is hidden in it. And by contrasting the rich yesteryear of a deluxe province with its present stage of economic depression Rushdie has explored the myth of royalty.
