by Salman Rushdie (2008)
Antonino Vespucci, a handsome young blond magician from Florence either wheedles his way into the heart of a Mongol emperor, or is earnestly in search of his rarified roots. A princess-survivor enchants and sleeps her way to safety or genuinely beguiles all who encounter her with a glimpse of the divine. Both are tricksters , both hustlers and survivors. It's hard to tell what the real deal is with the adventurer-protagonists of this tale.
The Enchantress of Florence feeds into two deep psychological tributaries for me:
Renaissance Italy and the Mongol (Mughal) Empire. Renaissance Florence fascinates many of us. It has been widely portrayed in popular culture from best-selling novels and films to the iconic art of Michelangelo,
Botticelli, and others. Most educated people have heard of Niccolo Machiavelli, the author of
The Prince, and a character in this book. Renaissance Florence is widely hailed as the birthplace of modern Humanism, as well as the place where the mercantile class became the ruling class (the Medici). It is an historical locale steeped in creativity, beauty, intrigue, possibility. The
Mongol Empire, in contrast, is one which conquered in a more traditional manner, by brute strength. Both societies shared a certain ecumenical character though: the
Italian Renaissance was made possible by the reintroduction of pagan (
Greek and Roman) myth and learning, which was transmitted via Muslim and Jewish scholars and traders who had preserved and translated the works of the Classical world. The empires forged by the various lines of Mongol warriors, the Ottoman and Mughal for example, were likewise ecumenical. As evident in the book, other religions were tolerated and even assimilated into the courts of the Muslim Mughals.
Salman Rushdie creates a mirror between these two cultures in The Enchantress of Florence.
My father was a professor of
Italian Renaissance history and Florence is where he met and wooed my mother. The aesthetics and intellectual curiosity of the Italian Renaissance were set up as ideals in my family. We also had a print of
Genghis Khan on horseback brandishing a bow and arrow, which hung at the top of the staircase. Not that I am into astrology, but I am a Sagittarius, and somehow associated myself with this print even before I knew who it was. As a result I have had a life-long fascination with the Mongol empire and Mongolia. It sounds nutty, I know, but there you have it.
"This may be the curse of the human race, not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike."
Mirroring is a major theme throughout the book. Qara Koz, the eponymous heroine, has her mirror servant girl. Simonetta, the Florentine model for Botticelli is also a mirror of Qara Koz, who is a mirror of Alaquwa, the Mongol sun-goddess, the ancestor of Genghis Khan. Qara Koz and Simonetta (who modeled for Botticelli as both Venus and the
Virgin Mary) are also mirrors of the archetypal goddess-enchantress, the objectified essence of female power, perfection and mystery. (Alanquwa - Mongol sun-goddess: compare with Virgin Mary and Amaterasu, Japanese
sun goddess?) Vespucci, the "Mongol of Love", is mirrored in the story of his putative (grand?)father Arcalia the Turk, who mirrors the nomadic, battlefield prowess of the
Mongols. Florence mirrors Sikri. The Florentine bordello mirrors the Sikri bordello. Qara Koz and her servant mirror the Skeleton and Mattress who mirror the Florentine prostitutes. There are also mirrors on the inside of Emperor Akbar's brocade yurt, but does he have a mirror? Thanks to the associative imagination, I am reminded of recent research into mirror neurons, which allow us to feel compassion, to mimic, to learn from copying sensory perceptions, and even to learn from memories of sensory perceptions.
(
Spoiler alert - the rest of this reveals the plot and some of the ending of the book.)
Nomadism, wandering, settlement, trying to return home, are all themes in the book as well. Rushdie was born and raised a Muslim in
India but completed much of his higher education in England, moved to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with his family in the 1960's when India and Pakistan were at war, and ended up as an outspoken atheist living in
New York City. Thanks to the fatwa issued against him for satirically portraying the prophet Mohammed in
The Satanic Verses, he in permanent exile from his homeland. I wonder: Is how Qara Koz finally returns to her homeland a reflection of the only way he can return to his, as a ghost?
The Enchantress of Florence as been critiqued for making too facile a comparison between Florence and "the East", between West and East, but I think Rushdie wrote this book for himself, for the elements in his own psyche and ancestry which he tries to reconcile. The
Mughals were a far cry from the intellectual despots some would like to equate with certain "Eastern" civilizations, but they were certainly not democrats. Note Emperor Akbar's internal struggle with his own despotism
"The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose, and that is the form of their devotion." ..
"The adoration of the divine was reimagined as an intellectual wrestling match in which no holds were barred."
Akbar, the Mughal emperor, struggles with the concept of god as a Renaissance humanist, as a pluralist, would. He even goes so far as to suggest that the divine may rest in the very questioning of the divine. Paradise is envisioned as a democracy, a place with true human rights. He imagines not using the royal we, of expressing himself as part of a whole, not just as a despot. He goes so far in his transgressive inner narrative as to question the existence of god, and to wonder whether it might be easier to figure out what goodness is without a god.
"This business of worship, of the abnegation of the self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail".
"Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path."
Repeated comments like this smack a bit of a Humanist screed. On the other hand, Rushdie also invokes a tribe of "Afghan Illuminati" who used a sort of pantheistic religion to justify any and all behavior, an amoral use of ecumenical spirituality. Modern-day fundamentalists accuse Buddhists, Unitarians and Humanists of similar amorality stemming from moral relativism.
This book has also been criticised for being too stylistically self-indulgent, too fawning over the personality of the writer (the storyteller). May be. The only annoying aspect of this novel for me was the incessant reference to how marvelous or beautiful such-and-such a character was. In retrospect, I think this is part of the point of the story. This style is the stuff of ancestral stories, of national mythologies. You need to hyperbolize the hero, the goddess. Otherwise he's not a hero, she's not a goddess. The adulation, the repetition is necessary to solidify the myth.
Witchcraft of language, storytelling and survival: Funny stuff:
"Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used Great Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass.." "
"All men needed to hear their stories told."
"While you were anesthetized to the tragedy of your life you were able to survive."
Akbar's existential angst
"I am absurd", he told himself. "A cockroach in a steaming turd has more significance than I." Where does it fit in with the main themes of the story? Because he has no one to mirror him, no one to contradict him? The novel also ends in a sense of tentativeness, of impermanence, albeit with tenderness towards our impermanence.
"I have come home after all," she told him. "You have allowed me to return, and so here I am, at my journey's end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours."
"Until you're not, the Universal Ruler thought. My love, until you're not."
