Mythical Metamorphosis in Salman Rushdie's 'The Firebird's Nest'

Myths and cultural past of India has been a favourite choice of Salman Rushdie partly because he has a tenuous link with his land which gives tremendous leaps to his thoughts and fancy and partly because India asa major literary subject helps him win the favour of his western audience by catering to their devious curiosity about Indian ethos. As a literary strategy he mixes the fiction of his mind with the material picked up from the past for for giving such an account of life as may both relevant and revealing to the contemporary reader.

In other words,his linking of the mythical or cultural past with the living present makes his writing a mythocentric historiographic metafiction. The Firebird’s Nest is one of Rushdie’s recent short stories published in the eight volume of New Writings (1999), an anthology of the best in contemporary literature. Conceived in the mythical image of the Phoenix,as the title reflects,and the Ovidian terms of metamorphosis, as the epigraph reads,this story explores the mythical,hystorical,economic and socio-cultural facets of contemporary life through two dominant metaphors,rain and fire.

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Rushdie has chosen these metaphors for their elemental nature that lends them infinite association with the collective unconscious nature of human race. The story opens with a description of drought which has engulfed the entire domain of princely state (rains have successively failed its thick forests and singing birds) and has turned into a dying place,a wasteland, forcing both man and animal to migrate and seek water, the life giving element.

Staggering cattle move to the south and east while the Prince,now only Mr. Maharaj after the abolition of stately privileges,moves to America in search of good fortune.

The story progresses with the return of Mr. Maharaj with this American bride in a limousine driving to his crumbling palace now six hundred year old,a virtual ruin of a gothic novel. She has been described as a “rich” and “fertile land” that will bring both “sons” and “rain”. She is a “rainmaker” capable of combining “capital” with “idea” and conjuring up “monetary nourishment” for any project. She had joined the enterprising Maharaj while he was exploring possibility of economic rainfall. Thus water or rain becomes a metaphor of survival in the sotry.

Rushdie has intensified the irony of life by showing that “cascades of precious water flow ceaselessly” in the palace while the rest of the kingdom is dying for a drop of water. Prince’s gluttony is his subjects’ famine. People assemble in large number at the palace spring to fill their pitchers. Even though those people who consider the American bride a “barren woman” whose “breasts are dry” for she embodies drought and therefore will bring “despair and gloom” to the region, Rushdie has made the necessity of rain metaphorically more pronounced.

American bride the glamour and strength of his princely heritage Mr. Maharaj displays the aura of his highness by inviting dignitaries and nobles to dinner by moonlight and arranging an extravaganza of horse race,camel rage,dancing,songs,fire works in her honor. But his effort to recreate the scintillating wonder of his lost “magic kingdom” proves to be his economic misadventure which he admits in his reaction to his bride’s teaching: “is this how you relax every night? ” “We impoverish ourselves to mnake you happy. How can you imagine that we are able to live like this?

We protect the last fragments of what we had,and now,you please you,we plunge deeper in debt. We dream only of survival; this Arabian night is an American dream. ” This economic aspect is intertwined with the issue of cultural collision in the story. The american bride is faded with the problem of homogeneity, the problem of leading life according to a custom she never anticipated. She has to remake her home in an alien environment where she feels she has lost directions as symbolized by the disappearance of railway tracks in her favourite movie that recurs in her dream.

The images of “burning bridges” and “burning boat” in her dream suggest the loss of links with her previous life and also cast apprehensions about her fate for she feels trapped in a world of fantasies where the idea of conjugal bliss is fraught with dangers of bride burning,a social malady that makes the metaphor of fire in the story more evocative. The sacrifical immolation of a woman labourer in her red sari in “the amphitheatre of the dry water hole” hoping for a good rain is another facet of this mythical narrative.

The metaphor of rain here joines the metaphor of fire. Rushdie describes women in general and the “demure” ones in particular as creatures of fiery heart and dressed in the colours of fire. Rushdie’s penchant for irony converges both on the superstitions and the allied inevitability of the fate of wman who,he describes,is most combustible for she burns as easily as a piece of paper and gets lost in the sky as apuff of smoke. His anguish over the dehumanization of society is more than obvious.

He aslo irects his satiric anger against gender bias. Rushdie shows that men may be eaten by their land that opens its jaws,the wide “cracks”,during drought but women die differently:”they catch fire and die”. In the bitterly ironical statement there is a clear inversion of the ancient myth about Sita’s survival in fire and her submission to the earth in “The Ramayana”. This inversion has been used to characterize both the fury of nature and the pathetic state of woman in the contemporary society,a tragic transformation.

The rationale of metamorphosis has been further expounded through the story withing the story which metaphorically accentuates the social evil of bride burning and mythically demonstrates the emergence of life from death. Miss Maharaj,the 60 year old fierce looking spinster sister of Mr. Maharaj narrates to the American bride of her brother the horrible tale of a gigantic mythological prince of that kingdom who had married a dancer of unfading beauty. Old age infirmities gripped the prince but his bride,even at fifty,looked a woman of 21.

The prince suspected his bride of taking lovers and subsequently developed sexual jealousy that led him to set his fort on fire in which both of them died. Only their children survived: a daughter who became a dancer and a son who grew into a sportsman. It was said that the old prince himself was metamorphosed into a “giant bird” composed entirely of flames and had burned his bride. Since then the same firebird has been appearing from time to time to burn other bride’s at their husbands’ instance by ‘brushing their bodies with his malevolent wings”. Miss Maharaj tells her that even Mr.

Maharaj,though a man of modern outlook,was equally helpless in this regard because all were bout to the metaphor of fire. Her question : “do you know ho many brides has he had? ” terrifies the American bride to her bones. Looking at her body she says “you have a strong body.. younger,but in other ways so unlike mine”. When the American bride is sleeping,she sits by her side and murmurs : “yes,a fine body,it could have beena dancer’s. It will burn well. ” Besides,she also describes how a princess recently commited suicide by “drinking fire” ,she crushed her heirloom diamonds in a cup and gulped them down.

Since the gossips about the fable keep burning throughout the yarn the whole atmosphere looks ghostly. The panic and bewilderment of the American bride ends only when the mystery of the fable gets blasted. Miss Maharaj,following her confrontation with her brother divulges the secret. “I am the firebird’s nest” and then turns into flames like Phoenix,the mythological bird. However she does not rise again. Instead the bodies of the other dancers who were also spinsters symbolizing infertility of dry earth like Miss Maharaj,burst and water pours out drowning the firebird and it’s nest.

The entire “drought hardened land” gets flooded and the region gets “cleansed of its horror”. The fairy looking dancers metamorphose into their normal selves and the rhythm of dance turns into the waves of flowing water which symbolizez the regenerative energy of nature. The story finally closes on a note of synthesis as suggested by the American bride’s “caressing of her swelling womb” and thinking that “the new life growing within her will be both rain and fire”. The metaphors of rain and fire thus becoming existential.

The Firebird’s Nest” is,therefore, a fictionalization of the myth of Phoenix. It makes an inquiry into the nuances of Indian life and suggests radical transformation for redemption from its delusions. The American bride’s fascination about the grandeurs of princely India has served as a narrative strategy and Rushdie,excercising fullo freedom of imagination,has skillfully interwoven reality and fantasy,history and gossip in the texture of his story using the mythical mode of apprehending reality,a mode most favoured by James Joyce or TS Eliot.

He has used the ghost element as technique of romance to comprehend the mythological past as well as to enact the concept of metamorphosis because the mystery about the firebird’s nest is hidden in it. And by contrasting the rich past of a princely state with its present phase of economic depression Rushdie has explored the myth of royalty.