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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
In an essay on Italo Calvino, Rushdie writes that "perhaps the most dominant characteristic of Calvino's entire output" is "his protean, metamorphic genius for never doing the same thing twice" (Imaginary Homelands 254). One might say that Rushdie has a protean, metamorphic genius for doing the same thing twice. Herein lies the difference between two types of storytellers: the metabasist and the katabasist. Katabasis is the ancient Greek term for journeying down into the under-world. A katabasist, one who writes about underworld descents, also characteristically employs the narrative structure of a journey to look inward, downward, and back. So one may posit the neologism of metabasist for a writer who never looks down and rarely looks back, having got things precisely, economically right the first time round. Thus, while Calvino the metabasist breaks new ground with every work, Rushdie the katabasist repeatedly mines the same site-the ground beneath, rather than the ground aheadfor different discoveries.
One of Rushdie's central preoccupations, explored in each of his fictions to date, is finding the appropriate novel form to express the "life shape" of an immigrant or emigrant in modern times. Fletcher, for example, notes Rushdie's exploration of "how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile" (2).This preoccupation is nowhere more evident than in his recent novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Here, as in previous fiction, Rushdie exposes the inadequacy of the concept of a line, either as a way of understanding lived experience or as a way of structuring narrative. Rai, his first-person narrator, explicitly rejects simple linearity in recounting the story of Ormus,Vina, and himself:
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumbling apart. (543)
Rai points to the inadequacy not only of traditional linear narrative but also of postmodernist disjunctions and Borgesian forked paths. But his own description of life's eternal bounciness seems to me much more gaily Rabelaisian than is the novel as a whole. Quite apart from bumping together and tumbling apart, Rushdie's troupe...