Cupid draw back your bow and let your arrow go
Straight to my lover’s heart for me
Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown is a novel of
revenge. Set primarily in India’s Kashmir, a territory beset by cycles of
violence among Muslims and Hindus, Rushdie’s is a tale of two protagonists,
each crying out against injustice, each seeking revenge. Shalimar, an acrobat
from the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, seeks revenge for his wife’s betrayal by
killing her and her lover, a counterterrorism official who was once the United
States ambassador to India. Shalimar seeks to further avenge himself by killing
the couple’s daughter, called India. India, then, desires revenge upon Shalimar
for the murder of her parents. Her desire is both urgent and confused: “Where
were the forces of justice, where was the Justice League, why weren’t
superheroes swooping down out of the sky to bring her father’s murderer to
justice?...she wanted dark superheroes…She wanted avenging angels…She didn’t
know what she wanted.” (Shalimar the
Clown, Random House, 2005, p. 331)
Once aware of
the other’s existence, Shalimar and India engage in a protracted duel, taking
aim at one another whenever possible. While Shalimar plots her murder, India
strikes out at him, now clandestinely, in letters, now openly, in court.
Sentenced to death at trial, Shalimar escapes prison. In the book’s final
scene, he comes to kill India, now called Kashmira, in the high-security
compound of her dead father’s house. In the last paragraphs of the novel, the
two armed opponents confront one another with their chosen weapons.
Shalimar carries a knife: “her stepfather was coming in, knife in hand,
neither the knife that had killed her mother nor the knife that had killed her
father but a third, virginal blade, its silent steel intended just for her.”
(p. 397) Shalimar may already have slain Kashmira’s guard dogs: “Were they
lying on the lawn with arrows through their throats?” (p. 397)
Traditionally, when
challenged to a duel, the
person who is challenged has the choice
of weapons. And indeed, it is Shalimar who has initiated this last duel
to the death. Kashmira owns a gun, but she is
also a practiced archer and “the arrow was her weapon of choice.” (p. 397) As
the assassin enters her bedroom, Kashmira, wearing night-vision goggles,
holding her golden bow, is poised to strike.
Shalimar the Clown is both a tale of
primitive revenge and a story about modern terrorism. Disillusioned by life and
love, Shalimar leaves his small village to train as a terrorist. Shalimar the Clown was first published
in 2005, four years after the destruction of September 11, sixteen years after
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa condemning
Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, and
seven years after the lifting of the fatwa.
Cupid
please hear my cry
And let your
arrow fly Straight to my lover’s
heart
Two recent novels that describe cycles of violence
offer intriguing parallels with Shalimar
the Clown. Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) is,
like Shalimar the Clown, a story of
love gone wrong; its engine is a variation on the revenge plot, and in its
climactic scene, one of the main characters slays his victims with a bow and
arrows. In David Vann’s Caribou Island (2011),
the author builds the climactic scene around a narrative of escalating violence
in a natural setting.
Caribou Island, off the Alaskan coast, is the remote setting for David Vann’s drama of family dysfunction. There domestic drama reaches a climax of mythic proportions. Propelled by a manic episode that culminates in the wish for vengeance, a housewife with very bad headaches becomes a weapon-wielding Agave whose temporary madness delivers a spurious catharsis.
In
these novels of revenge, what does the protagonists’ choice of weapons signify?
The use of bow and arrows in the climactic scenes of all three novels is
notable since their stories are set in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries.
Of
course, the archetypal dramatization of narrative climax with bow-and-arrows
induced carnage happens in the homecoming scene of Homer’s Odyssey. In Homer’s epic, the bow and arrows have utility in daily
life, and are integral to the functioning of society. Odysseus, as returning
war hero, would have used a bow and arrows in the Trojan War. Just so, on the
occasion of his homecoming, he will prove his identity by stringing a bow and
sending an arrow through twelve axes.
In
the build-up to the climactic scene, Odysseus’ wife Penelope sets up an archery
contest, vowing that she will marry the man who strings the bow easily, and
sends an arrow clean through all twelve targets. In Odyssey Book 19, Odysseus, disguised as a stranger, advises her:
“do not put off this contest in your house any longer./Before these people can
handle the well-wrought bow, and manage/to hook the string and bend it, and
send a shaft through the iron,/Odysseus of the many designs will be back here
with you.” (Odyssey, Book 19,lines
584-587)
The
climactic moment in which Odysseus strings the bow –– and shoots an arrow –– is
beautifully described in a simile in Book 21: “As when a man, who well
understands the lyre and singing,/easily, holding it on either side, pulls the
strongly twisted/cord of sheep’s gut, so as to slip it over a new peg,/So now
without any strain, Odysseus strung the great bow.” (lines 406-411) He then
tests the bowstring, and it resonates “like the voice of a swallow.”
Homer
uses rich symbolism to draw parallels between stringing a weapon and stringing
a musical instrument, between Odysseus’ skill and that of a singer. The
description is both visual and auditory. Odysseus lets the arrow fly through
the targets and says: “I missed no part of the mark.” (Odyssey, Book 21, line 425)
Yet
for all the beauty of its description, Odysseus’ stringing of the bow and
letting the arrow fly clean through the axes is about the violence to come. In
Book 22, suitor Eurymachos begs for mercy, but Odysseus replies that he cannot
be bribed with all Eurymachos’ possessions: “even so, I would not stay my hands
from slaughter,/until I had taken revenge for all the suitors’ transgression.”
(lines 63-64) And so the slaughter begins.
Flash forward in time to a tiny island in remotest Alaska, where an
American couple has tried with great difficulty to construct a log cabin. At
the end of a long tale of bitterness and failure, resentment and regret, the
wife, Irene, runs amok on the island. Irene explores Caribou Island with her
bow and arrows, but finds that the island is not right for her. The trees, “too
close, too crowded,” would entangle her bow if she were hunting moose. But
Irene is not hunting moose.
Exhilarated, Irene lets her first arrow fly into the trunk of a
cottonwood tree fifty feet away. She watches its flight, so fast its path is
beyond detection, its motion apparently motionless. Irene sees “The flight so
fast it was instant memory, not something that could be experienced, only known
afterward.” The fundamental paradox Irene experiences, however, is not the
paradox of Zeno’s arrow, in which motion becomes motionlessness, but the
paradox of Cupid’s bow, in which love is expressed through violent imagery.
Cupid’s bow, that classic love symbol, has become such a stereotype that we
hardly notice the paradox of the lover pursued with a weapon. Cupid’s bow is,
in effect, not just a symbol of love, but of ambivalence, love and hate:
Cupid, draw back your bow, and let your arrow go
Straight to my lover’s heart for me
Cupid, please hear my cry, and let your arrow fly
Straight to my lover’s heart for me
Irene lets arrows fly into tree trunks. Giddy from sleeplessness and
persistent headaches, she feels the island is capsizing. She is not too giddy,
however, to remember to save two arrows, since “she would take Gary with her,”
an ominous thought from the depressive daughter of a suicide. Approaching the
cabin, Irene recalls “hunting, as she had once hunted with Gary, making no sound…”
Once inside though, her resolve wavers–wavers, that is, until the supremely
petulant Gary tells her, “I love you.” At which point Irene draws Cupid’s bow,
freighted with resentment, and releases an arrow straight into Gary’s chest. In
a sadistic finish, she then nails him to the floor with her last arrow.
Ultimately her exhilaration fades, and Irene hangs herself, perpetuating the
pattern of family violence.
In
Homer’s epic, Odysseus’ bow and arrows have a full, resonant symbolic value
precisely because they are such a familiar part of Homeric society. Everyone in
Homer’s audience would have known what it is to string a bow, what it is to
string a lyre, and how a swallow sounds. Likewise, Odysseus’ homecoming has a
communal significance: the return of the rightful king to rule his people.
Odysseus’ revenge, however personally motivated, has a moral purpose, that
being the restoration of the social order to Ithaka.
At
the other end of the spectrum, Irene’s revenge comes across as
excessive, ill conceived, and biochemically determined by her headaches and her
sleepless mania. A further note of determinism is provided by Irene’s
hereditary depression. Caribou Island is
thus not a revenge drama in the classic sense, for the revenge drama, in its pure form, entails tragic
consequences upon a choice freely made. Caribou
Island is rather the tale of a couple who become ever more isolated from
society–too isolated on their small island to get medical help for Irene’s
severe headaches. Irene’s use of a bow and arrows to bring about their double
demise comes across as quixotic and improbable. She may wield her bow like a
hunter; she may be a pioneer at the farthest outpost of the American frontier;
she may run about the island like a maenad, but Irene is still a very ill
housewife yoked to a spiritless husband.
Where should We
Need to Talk About Kevin be placed along the spectrum of symbolic meaning and its relation to revenge? Kevin, a sullen boy who massacres his
classmates, is a trained archer–archery being his high school sport–so his
choice of weapons is at least as plausible as that of Kashmira in Shalimar the Clown and Irene in Caribou Island.
But however plausible Kevin’s choice is on the practical level,
the question remains: what does the bow and arrow signify in a contemporary
novel? For it is notable that the bow and arrow is arcane weaponry for the 20th
and 21st centuries. The bow and arrow has no key function in modern
society, and its use requires special training appropriate to a hobby or sport.
Contemporary fictional characters trained as archers are thus equipped with
unusual skill and potency. The skill they possess underlines their
individuality, and allows the authors of these fictions to associate their
bow-and-arrow wielding characters with a heroic past. Kashmira arms herself
against her assassin with a golden bow. Irene, in the course of inflicting
violence, fleetingly sees herself as a “giantess”–until her mania bottoms out.
Moreover, the logistics of using a bow and arrow–the strength and skill
it requires–and the symbolic meanings that have accrued to this weaponry over
time, invite the authors of these contemporary novels to build richly
constructed, suspenseful climactic scenes in which the symbol of bow and arrow
is available for the adumbration of deeper layers of meaning.
After the Odyssey,
the Western text that most closely associates skill at archery with heroism
is Robin Hood, long a popular
folktale before it attained written form. Robin Hood’s bow, like the bow of
Odysseus in the homecoming scene, is the effector of social justice. In the
world of the Odyssey, social justice
means restoring the rightful king to his land and his people and punishing
those who transgressed against his kingship. In Robin Hood’s England, in feudal
Nottingham and in the safety of Sherwood Forest, social justice means restoring
the balance of power between the nobles and the common people. Unlike Odysseus,
Robin Hood must remain an outlaw in order to restore the people of medieval
England to their proper estate.
Lionel
Shriver makes use of the myth of Robin Hood to develop the character of Kevin. Kevin
is a virtual outlaw from the beginning of his story, as told by his mother, Eva
Khatchadourian. A sociopath, Kevin gets darkly into trouble even as a small
child, and is evicted from the small children’s community. The author uses the
Robin Hood story to prepare the reader both for Kevin’s modus operandi at the climax, and for the violent outbreak itself.
From the beginning of his perplexing existence, Kevin is a model of alienation,
apathy, and acedia, a Latin term for
spiritual sloth, an indifference so profound medieval churchmen deemed it one
of the seven deadly sins.
When
Kevin as a child falls ill and feverish, his mother, often hostile to her son,
becomes close to him for the duration of his illness while reading him the
adventures of Robin Hood. Uncharacteristically,
the ill Kevin takes an interest in something, and his fascination
with the Robin Hood story leads him to develop his interest in archery, and
ultimately leads to the literal slaying of his despised school mates, and the
figurative slaying of his mother.
So
yes, Kevin is an outlaw of sorts, but in contrast to the motives of his
childhood folk hero Robin, Kevin’s reasons for existing at the margins of
society are entirely self-serving. Beyond the pale, Kevin is best able to plot
his incursions, inflict his curses, implement terror, and remain just detached
enough to despise the imperfect weaklings he might otherwise come to love.
Does
the choice of weapons – the bow and arrows
– ennoble the characters in these contemporary novels? In fact there are significant differences
here between the Rushdie novel and the novels by American authors. In Shalimar the Clown, the character India, like her mother Boonyi, an
acrobat, and the other artists of Pachigam, is trained in a time-honored skill;
the literature of India is replete with rich cultural associations to the bow
and arrows.
The bow, foremost among the
deadly weapons described in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (circa 8th century B.C.E.), is deployed in
the battle between the five sons of King Pandu and the hundred sons of King
Dhritarashtra. Indeed, the bow constituted the classical Indian weapon from the
time of the Vedas to the advent of
Islam.
According to Islamic tradition, the bow was the pre-eminent weapon given
by the Angel Jibrail to Adam in Paradise: it was not to be surpassed on Earth
or in Paradise, where the blessed practice archery. By tradition then, the bow
is a deadly weapon, a sacred weapon, and also for sport. Archery contests play
an important role in the literature of Indian antiquity: in the Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna wins his bride, Draupadi, in an
archery contest. The princes vying for Draupadi's hand had to shoot five
arrows at a revolving target, while looking only at its reflection in a bowl. In the Ramayana (circa 4th century B.C.
E.), hero Rama wins his bride Sita in a bow-bending contest.
 |
| Rama |
As a
trained archer, India is able to channel her energy and direct her purpose to
the ultimate showdown with Shalimar, who is trained as an artist, but also as a
terrorist.
The ultimate showdown in Rushdie’s novel is
intensely personal as well as allegorical. Shalimar, robbed of his beloved wife
Boonyi by American diplomat Max Ophuls, embodies the terrorist solution to
sectarian strife, but also terrorism as a response to exploitation and
domination by the West. Max Ophuls and Boonyi, the ‘stolen bride’, easily
represent Western imperialism and the seduction of India by the West. Rushdie’s
heroine, India – the offspring of Imperialism-Globalization and a ravaged subcontinent,
is both Shalimar’s opponent in the contest for India’s soul, and the avenger of
her murdered parents. In addition, India has re-named herself Kashmira; thus
when the final duel pits a knife-wielding Shalimar against the drawn bow of
Kashmira, a further symbolism: the sword of Islam versus the bow of Hindu
antiquity, suggests itself.
By
contrast, the use of the bow in Caribou
Island and We Need to Talk About
Kevin lacks the rich cultural associations of the bow as a signifier built
up during millennia of Indian culture. Without a cultural context, the use of bow
and arrows by the protagonists of the American novels is idiosyncratic at best.
In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the
avenging bow of Robin Hood – outlaw and people’s champion – is travestied when
Kevin turns his skill in archery to entirely destructive means; any pretense of
even a twisted revenge plot is then dissipated in chaos. Similarly in Caribou Island, when Irene wields the
bow, her biochemically-induced rampage, over-determined, ceases to be a
performance of revenge, degenerating instead into a confusion of mental
dysfunction and love gone wrong. Not only is the energy of the bow-wielding
American protagonists dissipated into destruction and chaos, it is energy unleashed
against the defenseless. In the climactic scenes of the American novels, the
bow is deployed neither as a weapon of war nor as archery equipment in a
high-stakes contest. Instead, the bow becomes a tool of carnage turned against
unarmed victims. The American novels climax not in a duels between armed
opponents, but in slaughter and massacre.
The
contest between Shalimar and India, however, will not result in slaughter or
massacre. It is a duel to the death, and will end only with the destruction of
one of the two opponents. On one level this is the contest between two
embodiments of modern India; on another level, it is the archetypal contest
between good and evil. Bent on avenging the murder of her father at Shalimar’s
hands, India is relentless, the bow her closest ally. Towards the end of the
novel, she besieges the imprisoned Shalimar with letters:
My letters are poisoned arrows…Now
you are my target and
I am your marksman
however my arrows are not dipped in
love but in hatred. My
letters are arrows of hate and they will
strike you down.
Shalimar the Clown, p. 374
Where does this hatred come from? In the case of India and Shalimar, it comes
from centuries of sectarian rivalry. Both India and Shalimar are bereaved by cyclical
violence. Of the two, it is Shalimar who becomes the instigator of the next
murderous cycle. Shalimar the Clown is
about the making of a terrorist: one who takes deadly aim at society in the
course of settling personal scores. A post-9/11 novel, Shalimar treats the theme of terrorism head-on.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is
also about the making of a killer: Kevin becomes a mass-murderer whose
psychopathology is attributed in equal parts to love gone wrong (his mother’s
rejection of him as an infant) and the false values of American society
(covering a wide swath: everything from the aesthetics of contemporary house
design to the untested optimism and upbeat patriotism of Kevin’s father). The
time frame of We Need to Talk About Kevin
runs from the narrative of the beginning of the story, the years preceding
Kevin’s birth, to the dénouement in which Eva visits Kevin in prison and
prepares for his release. It is significant, then, that even as the
time frame of We Need to Talk About Kevin
encompasses September 11, 2001, the destruction of that day, the trauma,
and its unfolding significance, is passed over in silence.
It
suits the narrative purposes of Kevin author
Lionel Shriver to excoriate the United States of the 1980s–90s for its cultural
shallowness and economic and environmental excesses without confusing the
picture by evoking America of 2001: ambushed, and in that terrible unawareness,
defenseless: attacked on her own soil. In 2011, Shriver was commissioned by BBC
Radio 4, as one of five “internationally acclaimed authors,” to write one of
“The 9/11 Letters” – short fiction reflecting
on the global consequences of the September 11 attacks. Given the opportunity
to go on record concerning Al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, Shriver came up with a story called “Prepositions.”
“Prepositions” is the self-pitying letter of a woman whose husband died on September 11, 2001, but not in the September 11 attacks.
While not quite constituting a reproach against those killed in the attacks,
Shriver’s story is mean-spirited, straying far from the heart of the matter:
catastrophic loss and social upheaval. This letter from Rachel, the accidental
widow, to Sarah, the 9/11 widow of David, bemoans the fact that a 9/11 widow
can dine out on her story, while the widow of a man who happened to die on 9/11 cannot. In fact Rachel
has heard Sarah’s story so many times at so many dinner parties that she can
recite it verbatim – and does so, in telegraphic style. Pointing out that “In
New York, there are thousands of stories like David’s now,” Rachel proceeds to
tell the story of her loss. Shriver uses Rachel’s envious persona to belittle
the victims of 9/11. “Everyone who died in 9/11 is described as a “hero,”
Rachel complains, “If you don’t mind, David did nothing but go to work.”
“Prepositions” uses displacement – displacement from the catastrophic loss
suffered by thousands to the idiosyncratic complaints of the Rachel persona –
to deny the victims of the 9/11 attacks the appropriate memorial of collective
grief. Freed from the temptation to say that her fellow citizens, victims of
terrorism, are not grievable, Shriver achieves a comparable effect by insisting
on the pathos of one woman whose husband died on September 11, and who does not have the solace of a public
commemoration.
Why
is Shriver driven to ignore or displace the events of 9/11? Very likely because
the mythos surrounding that day directly conflicts with the mythos of her
novel, in which one of the roots of Kevin’s violence is the false gods of the
USA, worshipped by Kevin’s father Franklin, but not by his mother, Eva, whom we
suspect of articulating the author’s point of view. This is important, because one
of Shriver’s tasks is to persuade the reader into a covert identification with
Kevin – an identification with a quintessentially unappealing character that
only becomes plausible to the extent that the reader can be convinced that
Kevin is himself a kind of victim – of American dysfunction. Just as the author of “Prepositions”
displaces the September 11 tragedy of collective loss onto an account of one
anomalous bereavement, so the author of Kevin
displaces the tragedy of a mass killing onto the anomalous tale of a
sociopath with twisted motives for revenge.
If
the three contemporary novels under discussion can be likened, in some ways, to
classic revenge tragedies, is it arguable that each of these realist tragedies
offers the reader an experience of catharsis? An effective catharsis depends
not only on the plotting of the climactic scene in each novel, but on the
reader’s ability to identify with the key characters of that scene.
Catharsis in Caribou Island
might seem promised by the sheer wildness of the release of tension as Irene
transforms herself from a vessel of pent-up passivity to a dynamic
archer-avenger. Indeed, the novel may appear to mimic tragic rhythms in the
determinism of its finish, whereby the family curse: a daughter discovering her
mother’s suicide, is repeated in the next generation despite Irene’s conscious
efforts to avoid just that eventuality. The novel’s finish, however, is closer
to melodrama than it is to tragedy, with its atmosphere of over-kill in a very
small world peopled by spiritless characters. Moreover, Irene is not an easy
character for the reader to identify with. Depressed and seemingly helpless
throughout the novel, her moment of ‘liberation’ is as dysfunctional as it is
destructive.
What
about catharsis for the reader of We Need
to Talk About Kevin? For the massacre carried out by Kevin in the high
school gymnasium is an ambush as well-executed as the one in the Odyssey. Like Odysseus, Kevin locks his assembled
victims in a space where there is nowhere for them to run, nowhere to hide.
Unlike Odysseus, however, Kevin does not slaughter the suitors who have been
eating up his substance, courting his wife, and threatening his kingship. No,
the human frailty that makes Kevin’s victims suitable candidates for slaughter
is, in keeping with Shriver’s critique of American culture, their willingness
to believe that they were chosen to receive a school award because they are special. For the reader who can succeed
in despising a fictional group of wannabe special high school kids enough to identify with Kevin's motivation for the slaughter, the scene in the gymnasium may have some
cathartic effect. The reader may experience fear and a derisory pity.
What
of the other scene of carnage in Kevin?
Here Eva, the narrator, who has been describing her angst over their son in
letters to her husband, is revealed to have been writing to a ghost. For she
arrives home before the carnage that is to take place at the the high school, to find that Kevin
has been busy with his bow and arrows in the back yard. Horrors abound: Kevin has slain his sister,
and Eva discovers her husband – Kevin’s father – pinioned by literal arrows perhaps analagous to Eva’s rhetorical pinioning of Franklin’s retrograde
optimism, naiveté, and above all, love of country and patriotism. Again, for
the reader who can succeed in despising this character as much as the author
clearly despises him, the experience of catharsis is a possibility.
And
what does the reader experience of catharsis in Shalimar the Clown? For Rushdie steers clear of melodrama in this
richly layered narrative in which every apparent extravagance, from the tale of
the love affair of Shalimar and Boonyi – both born on the eve of Partition – to
the story of the village where Hindus and Muslims feast together – every suspected exaggeration – is masterfully
incorporated into the realistic, historically attuned truth-telling corpus of the novel. Rushdie knows how
to structure plot around character development, and amidst the beauty and lyricism
of his writing, he does not forget how to build the story to a dramatic climax
that also illuminates the novel’s themes.
So
how does the master dramatize the final confrontation between Shalimar and
Kashmira: avenger versus avenger, each crying out for justice? Kashmira has to
wait for Shalimar to come to kill her. She keeps her vigil. And she practices
archery. When Shalimar finally comes for her, when the lights of the compound
go out, she is ready with her night-vision goggles; she is perched and waiting
with her golden bow.
Some
have argued that, unlike the showdowns in Midnight’s
Children and The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown ends in a hung
showdown. And it is true that the novel’s cinematic finish produces a blackout
before the victor in the final contest is revealed. Thematically, too, it may
be that the hung showdown best illustrates India as a nation in the balance,
still represented as much by the Shalimars as by the Kashmiras.
And
yet there is another possibility. For the reader who has identified with
India-Kashmira throughout, there is the possibility of catharsis with a
different reading of the novel’s end. Let us look at the novel’s final words:
She felt the taut bowstring passing
against her parted lips, felt the foot
of the arrow’s shaft
against her gritted teeth, allowed the last seconds to
tick away, exhaled and
let fly. There was no possibility that she would
miss. There was no
second chance. There was no India. There was only
Kashmira, and Shalimar
the clown.
This
is the stark contest between two rivals for India’s future. In this moment in
time, only these two characters, these two archetypes, are present. The girl
who was named India no longer exists. The woman of that girl does not claim to
embody the soul of a subcontinent. She is Kashmira now, and her task is to
defend her life. To do this she must kill. We hear her silently
voicing-thinking the thought, “There was no possibility that she would
miss.” But this is also the voice of the
author. Rushdie has prepared her for the final showdown, has given her a golden
bow. There are no second chances, and there is no possibility that she will
miss. After the cinematic blackout, victory belongs to Kashmira.
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