Rushdie as Orpheus, on Guitar (Page 2)

They believe in the Divine Mother Goddess-Ma in her concrete high-rise in Düsseldorf.... They believe in the name of God written in the seeds of a watermelon. They believe in the wise ones flying towards them in a comet's tail. They believe in rock 'n' roll.

What Ormus hears a Thousand and One Nights before it shows up on VH-1--and his coma, coincidentally, also lasts exactly two years, eight months and twenty-eight days--is whatever tune the future will dance to, like Bo Diddley or Bob Dylan or the Beatles. It's just that, till he starts writing them himself, he gets the lyrics wrong. He's channeling his dead dizygotic twin brother, Gayomart, from some otherworld Las Vegas, and there seems to be static on the woo-woo line. But what a wicked Rushdie does with these parallel and psychopompous universes is play.

Thus an Elvis called Jesse Parker whose manager's name is "Colonel" Tom Presley, a Placido Lanza and the Great Pretender, Uncle Meat and the Plastic Ono Band, Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel, and Jack Haley's Meteors. Lou Reed is female, and Laurie Anderson's her man. John Lennon sings "Satisfaction" and Andy Warhol is called Amos Voight, seen often in the company of the porno actresses Angel Dust and Nutcracker Sweet. Instead of "Punk," we get "Runt, the new rejectionism." For all I'd know, groups like Icon and the Clouds or Trex and the Glam, or Sigue Spangell and Karmadogma could be real. For a long time, I actually thought I'd heard the music of Red China and the Single Girl (Peter DeVries), Septic Tank and Fascist Toejam (Thomas Pynchon) and Pus Casserole and the Child Abusers (Tom Wolfe). But I don't get out much, and when I do, reality always seems to be raining on me. Already, U2 is singing some of the lyrics Rushdie wrote for Ormus and Vina.

Between glimpses of Vina-as-Tina-as-Janis-as-Madonna-as-Evita and Ormus as snug in his glass coffin on stage as he was in his preemie incubator, Rushdie gives us the usual rock mise en scène--ridiculously young blues rockers, hard-edged raunchy women, hallucinatory troubadours, screaming feedbacklash; "slashed fabrics, bondage thongs, body piercing, the maquillage and attitude of android replicants on the run from exterminating blade runners"; fan-club cultists and deep-think CD reviewers "at whose extreme fringes lurk hairy charismatics with much the same psychiatric profiles as the self-impalers at the heart of Shiite Muharram processions: denizens of the psychotropics of Capricorn, the lands of the sacrificed goat," like, for instance, his rock-critic caricatures Rémy Auxerre and Marco Sangria--but it is this slip-sliding from affectionate putdown to witty sendup that most persuasively suggests rock's genuine chameleon powers, its shape-shifting tricksterism. See how the songwriter-singer turns into a music video, which turns into a movie tie-in, which turns into car commercials or Miami Vice. How like the ancient absent gods! As protean as Proteus, in fact--morphing as the debased equivalent of metamorphosis in a publicity age in which we sacrifice our sense of shame rather than our kids (or goats).

American literature is likewise morphed. Besides the echoes and tag lines from Vonnegut, Didion, Pynchon, Sontag and Frost, we are asked to spend time in an imaginary library where Sal Paradise has written Beat "odes to wanderlust" and Nathan Zuckerman is the author of Carnovsky, where John Shade writes poetry and Charlie Citrine writes plays and John Yossarian writes novels and Kilgore Trout writes science fiction, where Alfred Fiedler Malcolm is a lisping old warhorse of a literary critic whose Achilles' heels are nipped at by young turks like Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. For that matter, Rushdie's "otherworld" bears a strong likeness to Nabokov's Antiterra, where we might also have found European meta-novelists like Dedalus and Matzerath, and where Pierre Menard probably did write Don Quixote.

And so is world history squigglevisioned and computer-graphicked. A number of smaller countries in Western Europe--Illyria, Arcadia, Midgard, Gramarye--vote down membership in the Common Market. A frazzled Rai shoots combat photographs in "the new post-Soviet hot spots of Altynaï-Asylmuratova and far-flung Nadezhda-Mandelstán." Britain under a Labor government can't seem to extricate itself from Vietnam. Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle jams, Sanjay Gandhi makes an emergency landing, Sukarno survives an attempted Communist coup and Indira Gandhi wins a war with Pakistan. The amazing thing is, because of similar surprises later on in this dream-along docudrama, everything will turn out just the way it would have if Ormus Cama hadn't been gunned down, like John Lennon, by a crazed assassin with an .09 millimeter Giuliani & Koch automatic.

But you get the subversive idea. And I haven't even mentioned how Rushdie settles some old sorehead scores with Cat Stevens and Anatole Broyard.

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