BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Published: November 2, 1983
SHAME. By Salman Rushdie. 319 pages. Knopf. $13.95.
WHEN the great stampede of Salman Rushdie's new novel has passed and its hooves are no longer beating along one's synapses, a voice inside one's head asks timidly, What did we do to deserve all this revenge and violence? What did Mr. Rushdie's characters do? What did Pakistan do? Or not precisely Pakistan: ''The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite,'' writes Mr. Rushdie. ''There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.''
If one had to find the realistic roots of Mr. Rushdie's narrative, one might arrive at the following aside by the narrator. In it he meditates on the news of a Pakistani father who not so long ago, in the East End of London, ''murdered his only child, a daughter, because by making love to a white boy she had brought such dishonour upon her family that only her blood could wash away the stain.''
''The news did not seem alien to me,'' the narrator ruminates. ''We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.''
''Between shame and shamelessness,'' he continues, ''lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.''
But this is realistic psychology, a possible subject for a treatise by Frantz Fanon. If Mr. Rushdie had followed its logic in ''Shame,'' he would have robbed his novel of its spectral magic, its breakdown of narrative logic that allows time to rush suddenly forward and reveal the end of things, or permits characters to be reincarnated in each other. He would have robbed his novel of its truth - not precisely the truth of parable or allegory or myth, but the truth of a narrative that describes a world apart and is a system accurate and logical only unto itself.
Most damaging of all, an adherence to realism would have robbed ''Shame'' of the character of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, the fictional reincarnation of that Pakistani girl who was murdered by her father out of shame. Sufiya Zinobia is the tiny girl whose gender so enraged her father, Raza Hyder, the future military dictator of his country, that even at her birth she blushed in shame. The heat of that shame incubates a beast inside of Sufiya Zinobia, a beast that grows and takes possession of the tiny girl until as an adult she must be immured in an attic to be kept from wandering out at night, seducing strange men and tearing off their heads. When she escapes that attic, she leaves ''a hole in the bricked-up window. It had a head, arms, legs.'' At the end she will return in the form of a white panther to topple her father's regime and destroy her shameless husband with the heat of her rage. I am not giving anything away. The suspense of the story lies in its fabulous illogic.
The story of Sufiya Zinobia is just one of the threads in a pattern so rich and various that it rivals the 18 shawls embroidered by Rani Harappa to depict ''The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great,'' Rani's husband and Raza Hyder's rival for the dictatorship of the country the author calls P. Follow any one of the threads and it leads to a conclusion equally phantasmagoric. Still, a reader steeped in Western rationalism wants to know what seeds Mr. Rushdie's country has sewn to reap such a terrifying whirlwind. Is it a sin of geographical presumption she has committed - of being ''a palimpsest'' obscuring what lies beneath? That is part of it, the narrator seems to suggest: ''To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten; there was nothing else to be done.''
Or does the ultimate responsibility lie in the character of the novel's picaresque ''shameless'' hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, who bears the name of an Eastern poet famous only in the West, who has a phobia about being on the edge of things (he grows dizzy whenever he approaches the border of his country), who embraces Western logic by becoming a medical doctor, and who ends up marrying and being destroyed by the beast, Sufiya Zinobia? Is Omar Khayyam a Jonah in the belly of Pakistan?
Each of these answers has a truth; the tragedy of ''Shame'' lies both in the evasion of historical destiny and in embracing that destiny too violently. Yet this doesn't begin to account for the extravagantly tragicomic nightmare evoked by ''Shame,'' which does for Pakistan what Mr. Rushdie's equally remarkable first novel, ''Midnight's Children,'' did for India. The narrative voice of ''Shame'' creates its own irresistible logic. In a postscript to his story, the author acknowledges having quoted Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, Nikolai Erdmann and Georg B"uchner. Here and there in the text, one can't help thinking of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. These are extraordinary writers with whom to be associated, but it's company that Salman Rushdie deserves.
photo of Salman Rushdie