In Rough Country (17 page)

Archie's young wife Rose, giving birth unassisted in the couple's wilderness cabin, wakes from a bloody stupor

It isn't clear whether Archie survives a terrible Wyoming winter but Rose is found dead at the cabin, rumored to have been luridly “raped and murdered and mutilated by Utes.” The story's wisdom is simple frontier logic: “Some lived and some
died, and that's how it was.” It's only to those who haven't been listening closely that “Them Old Cowboy Songs” sound sentimental.

Though in most of her fiction Annie Proulx has focused on the hardscrabble lives of men, two of the more fully realized stories in
Fine Just the Way It Is
are told from the perspective of young women. In “Testimony of the Donkey” a young couple are similarly “suffused with euphoria” for the wilderness: “They had shown each other their lapsarian atavistic tastes, their need for the forest, for the difficult and solitary, for what [Catlin's] father called ‘the eternal verities'”…Each is fiercely independent, obsessive:

Casting off her lover, and in defiance of the Wyoming Forest Service which has closed the trail she intends to take, reckless Catlin persists in hiking alone in the Old Bison range; the reader waits for the inevitable to happen, an accident that
leaves Catlin pinned by a heavy rock, helpless as she sinks into hallucination and lethargy, dying of thirst:

Reduced to sheer appetite and terror, poor Catlin who'd imagined herself so independent tries to call out her spurned lover's name—“but ‘Marc' came out as a guttural roar, ‘
Maaaa…
,' a thick and frightening primeval sound.”

“Tits-Up in a Ditch”—the provocative title refers to a cow that has wandered off to die in a ditch, in this contorted position—is the final story of
Fine Just the Way It Is
, and the most ambitious and sympathetic. Narrated in an intentionally flat, repetitive prose shorn of the metaphor-laden language for which Proulx is known, the forty-two-page story is an extended elegy reminiscent of “Brokeback Mountain” in the bleakness of its characters' lives and the implacable nature of their losses, including those losses of which they are scarcely aware. The young female protagonist is Dakotah Lister whose
rebellious teenaged mother has run away, leaving the fatherless Dakotah for her embittered grandparents to bring up on their run-down “trash” ranch: “Since [pioneer times] the country had become trammeled and gnawed, stippled with cattle, coal mines, oil wells and gas rigs, striated with pipelines. The road to the ranch had been named Sixteen Mile, though no one knew what that distance signified.”

Dakotah's grandfather Verl Lister, like many another rural male in Proulx's Wyoming, once aspired to be a rodeo performer—

—now a sort of macho-invalid on his deteriorating ranch close by the far more prosperous Match Ranch owned by villainous Wyatt Match—“a sharp-horned archconservative with a hard little smile like a diamond chip”—whose consuming vision is “maintaining the romantic heritage of the nineteenth-century ranch, Wyoming's golden time.” Neither Verl Lister nor Wyatt Match is much more than a caricature sketched in broad slashing strokes, but Dakotah acquires a measure of depth and dignity as the story develops, despite her passivity and barely
average intelligence; seemingly by chance Dakotah becomes involved with a high school classmate named Sash Hicks who marries her, impregnates her, breaks up with her and runs off to join the U.S. Army, leaving her to raise their infant son alone. Proulx's unembellished account of the young couple's failed marriage has the summary tone of the heavily ironic “Job History” of
Close Range
, in which a similarly luckless young married couple of an earlier generation try desperately to make a living in a rapidly changing rural Wyoming.

With naive idealism—imagining that she might study to become a “medic” of some sort—Dakotah herself enlists in the U.S. Army, but scores low on tests and winds up in the Military Police where, with seeming inevitability, given the grim contours and chute-like possibilities of Proulx's cosmology, she is seriously injured in an explosion at a checkpoint in Iraq, where she has been assigned the task of searching Iraqi women. Shipped back home with a prosthetic right arm, Dakotah discovers that her infant son has been killed in a vehicular accident caused by her ignorant grandfather Verl and that her husband Sash—from whom she was never divorced—has been shipped back to Wyoming too, in far worse shape than Dakotah:

In fact, in an ironic gender reversal, it isn't the disillusioned Dakotah but the damaged young veteran Sash Hicks who winds up—to use Wyoming's crudely poetic figure of speech—“tits-up in a ditch.”

 

So too with much of the “old”—“rural”—Wyoming, Proulx suggests. In virtually every story in these three Wyoming volumes there is an acknowledgment, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, that—as the owner of the Harp Ranch concedes, in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”—“the old world was gone.” Young people flee their parents' ranches, preferring to live urban lives; ranch hands and “cowboys” are scarce, as able-bodied men prefer to work out of state, for more money; the once-Wyoming “paradise” is now

All that remains of the glory days of the nineteenth century are theme-park ranches for tourists and hokey Wild West celebrations like the “Rodeo Days” parade in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” in which a motley assortment of locals march as “pioneers,” teenaged boys dress as “Indians,” costumed “cowboys” trot past on horseback twirling six-shooters, and not a single rancher is represented: “It was all pioneers, outlaws, Indians, and gas.”

Fine just the way it is
is a smug expression used with dogmatic frequency by Wyoming residents like the archconservative rancher Wyatt Match, meaning that Wyoming is “fine” as it is, without the intrusion of despised outsiders like federal politicians and policy makers and anti-cattle/anti-beef agitators who want an end to the open-range grazing that has proven to be ruinous to the ecology of the West; ironically,
fine just the way it is
also happens to be a phrase used, in Proulx's satiric story “I've Always Loved This Place,” by Charon, in reference to his own habitat, Hades.

The Enchantress of Florence
by Salman Rushdie

I
n Salman Rushdie's
Fury
(2001), a novel of Swiftian dyspepsia published the very week of 9/11, the fifty-five-year-old misanthropic Professor Malik Solanka, “retired historian of ideas,” has enjoyed an unexpected popular success for having created a BBC-TV series called “The Adventures of Little Brain” in which a doll called “Little Brain”—handcrafted by Solanka himself—interviews a series of “Great Minds” dolls in a familiar history-of-philosophy format. “Little Brain” is a sassy, spiky-haired Candide who, in contemporary talk-show fashion, goads her interviewees into surprising revelations:

In deep disgust with his contemporaries, especially his fellow academicians at King's College, Cambridge, Solanka becomes entranced by the possibility of seeing the world “miniaturized”:

As Jonathan Swift demonstrates in the savage comedy of
Gulliver's Travels
, “humanity” is but a matter of scale: rendered as dolls, miniaturized like the Lilliputians of Gulliver's first voyage, we are reduced not only in size but in stature; our ideals, our suffering, our most grievous quarrels are revealed as ridiculous, and our “Great Minds” become comic characters to be exploited by the media. When Swift's Gulliver ventures into the land of the Brobdignagians, he is revulsed by the giants' physical ugliness even as, a doll-like Lilliputian in their eyes, his race is condemned by the King of Brobdignag in the most pitiless Swiftian terms:

Set primarily in New York City—a city “boiling” with money where the very harness bells on the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park jingle like “cash in hand”—
Fury
exudes an air of personal grievance and rage that seems disproportionate to Solanka's experience as a professor, historian, husband, father, minor celebrity; virtually everyone Solanka has known or encounters is despicable, given to embittered ranting monologues in confirmation of Solanka's conviction that “life is fury.”

Typically in a novel by Salman Rushdie, the protagonist falls in love with a
femme fatale
(here, named “Neela Mahendra”) so ravishingly beautiful that strangers stagger up to her to gape at her; he becomes “deeply enmeshed in her web…The queen webspyder, mistress of the whole webspyder posse, had him in her net.” Soon, however, Solanka discovers that “this beautiful, accursed girl” is “an incarnation of a Fury”—

Greeted with a mixed critical reception in 2001,
Fury
is best appreciated as a machine-gun volley of Swiftian indignation, at its highest pitch fueled by a powerful charge of self-loathing like a
cri de coeur
from the beleaguered author whose life as a private citizen ended with nightmare abruptness on February 14, 1989, when the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa
, or death sentence for Rushdie's alleged blasphemy in his pyrotechnic-Postmodernist surreal black comedy
The Satanic Verses
(1988); one feels the author speaking through the beleaguered Solanka in terror of the Erinyes—the Furies of ancient Athens—“Serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged” hounding him for the remainder of his life.

Where the strategy of
Fury
is to miniaturize by way of corrosive satire, the strategy of Rushdie's new, tenth novel
The Enchantress of Florence
, an elaborately allegorized “romance-adventure” set in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Florence and in Fatehpur Sikri, the capital city of India's Mughal empire, is to inflate in the more genial, disingenuous way of fables, fairy tales,
The Thousand and One Nights
as narrated by the archetypal storyteller Scheherazade. Because
The Enchantress of Florence
is simultaneously a postmodernist work of prose fiction, highly self-conscious and stylized, variously influenced by predecessor metafictionists John Barth (
Giles Goat-Boy, Chimera
), Italo Calvino (
Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
), Gabriel García Márquez (
One Hundred Years of
Solitude
,
The Autumn of the Patriarch
), among others, the inflation of Rushdie's characters and the story in which they participate is presented in comic-epic terms; here is a “historical novel” that is also an artful parody of the genre, by a master storyteller not unlike his audacious protagonist Niccolò Vespucci who mesmerizes the despotic Mughal emperor with his storytelling skills: the magician-charlatan-imposter-artist who is “not only himself but a performance of himself as well.”

Rushdie's storyteller-hero is by no means an ordinary individual, even a somewhat extraordinary individual: this bold traveler from the West—we will learn, in time, that he is one Ago Vespucci of Florence, who has renamed himself Niccolò Vespucci after his closest boyhood friend Niccolò “il Machia” (Machiavelli)—rides in a bullock-cart standing up “like a god” when we first see him; his hair is a “dirty yellow” yet flows down around his face “like the golden water of the lake.” The Western traveler to exotic India has an “overly pretty face”—in fact, the traveler is “certainly beautiful, and knew that his looks had a power of their own.” Somehow, he has acquired seven languages: Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English, and Portuguese; he has been “driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.” As in the oldest and most enduring of young-male-quest tales, the youthful traveler seeks an audience with the ruler of the strange new land he is visiting; the ruler will be a patriarch, an older man likely to be tyrannical, yet drawn to the young man for his very brashness and cunning; if the young man seeks a father, the older man seeks a son: it is inevitable that the Mughal emperor whom the
traveler encounters, Akbar the Great (1542–1605), will have sons who have disappointed him, and will long for a young man he can trust:

As soon as Akbar meets the yellow-haired traveler—who gives his name as “Mogor dell'Amore”—he succumbs to the youth's charms, despite his suspicion that the traveler may be a charlatan: “How handsome this young man was, how sure of himself, how proud. And there was something in him that could not be seen: a secret that made him more interesting than a hundred courtiers.” As Rushdie presents Akbar, the emperor is both a brooding philosopher-king who questions the tradition into which he has been born—“
Maybe there was no true religion
…He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the center of things, not god”—and something of a buffoon, a comically inflated megamythic figure:

Much of
The Enchantress of Florence
is couched in such playful tongue-in-cheek bombast, echoing, at far greater length and with far more literary ambition, the comedy of Rushdie's charming book for children
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(1990), in which folk and fairy tales are genially mocked. (“Here's another Princess Rescue Story I'm getting mixed up in,” Haroun thought…“I wonder if this one will go wrong, too.”) It isn't clear when we are to take Akbar seriously and when Rushdie is inviting the reader to laugh at him:

Though he insists that he is not a tyrant and that he believes that “in the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose” yet Akbar executes the grandson of an old enemy:

What Akbar longs for is the exotic West: which comes to him in the guise of the yellow-haired “Mogor dell'Amore” with a tale to tell so tangled (“This was his way: to move toward his goal indirectly, with many detours and divagations”) it will require hundreds of pages of Rushdie's challenging prose.

As the yellow-haired traveler and the emperor are so exaggerated as to suggest comic-book figures, so too are Rushdie's female enchantresses exaggerated to the point of burlesque. Of his numerous queens and mistresses Akbar's favorite is Jodha, who doesn't exist at all except as the emperor's sexual fantasy—“A woman without a past, separate from history, or, rather, possessing only such history as he had been pleased to bestow upon her.” Here is Akbar's ideal—“mirror”—female.

But to Akbar's anima-self is given the insight about which
The Enchantress of Florence
is constructed, that Western Europe is enthralled by India, as India is enthralled by Western Europe:

And:

At the court of Akbar it is even fantasized that Queen Elizabeth of England is “nothing less than the Western mirror of the emperor himself”:

As the credulous Akbar becomes immediately infatuated with the yellow-haired Western traveler so he becomes infatuated
with the traveler's (fraudulent) representation of the “faraway redhead queen,” he sends Elizabeth love letters which are never answered declaring his “megalomaniac fantasies of creating a joint global empire that united the eastern and western hemispheres.” In one of those post-modernist flash-forwards intended to break the storyteller's spell and to remind us as with a nudge in the ribs
This is just fiction, a tall tale being told by a veteran performer
the bemused omniscient narrator allows us a glimpse of the future: