How to See Through False Love and Faith
Salman Rushdie's take on Don Quixote is a vast journey across the United States. It says a lot about who we are and how we've changed as a country.
Salman Rushdie may be known for surviving his 2022 knife attack and the 1989 fatwa before that. However, he should be better known as a funny writer. His detailed observations of ordinary people, their struggles, and his sense of humor make him the perfect author to do a modern take on Don Quixote.
Quichotte follows a father and his imaginary son on a journey across the United States. The father, Ismail Smile, is a sales executive obsessed with a talk show host. He embarks on his odyssey to proclaim his love for her and marry his television love. In an homage to another man with a hilariously unrealistic goal, he signs his letters to his beloved, “Quichotte”.
Ismail’s journey also gives Rushdie a chance to make deep observations of the American people. Quichotte’s America is ravaged by partisan hostilities and the opioid crisis. It’s a place where glistening TV shows mask the gruesome realities millions of ordinary Americans face. Even television stars aren’t immune from those struggles.
False Love
Miss Salma R is Ismail’s true love, but she views people like Ismail with contempt. She compares letters from people like Ismail unfavorably to “crazy people, religious nuts, envious people, people who made her the incarnation of their discontents, racists, misogynists, the usual crew.” Worse to her are the distant lovers:
“Many of them were actually in love with themselves and gave her to understand that they were doing her a kindness by bestowing their love upon her.” After describing the varieties her letters from distant lovers came in, she wonders what their professed love says about her. “Was she so shallow that these nonswimmers thought they could paddle their feet in her waters? Was she so two-dimensional that they thought they could fold her up and put her in their pockets? She wanted to know how she was seen by others, but this aspect of the knowledge she acquired gave her a heavy heart.”
Rushdie draws a sharp distinction between true love and false love. The superficial love in Miss Salma R’s letters fails to see her character’s deeper layers. None of these admirers know her well enough to love her. Even worse, they pride themselves on their deep affection for the false picture they have of her. They’re proud of how little of her they see.
Remaining unseen is a painful experience. We all want our value recognized, especially by those we trust enough to love. Miss Salma R has many layers that aren’t captured by her TV show.
False Faith on Top of False Love
One of the first things we learn about Miss Salma R is her “fondness for recreational and mind-soothing painkillers.” Miss Salma R’s addiction also buries unseen pain.
When she was 12, Miss Salma R’s grandfather sexually abused her. She remembers the statues of the “gods Shiva and Krishna and the Buddha too.” She also remembers the resentment she felt at their silent presence:
“What were they doing, those great artists both ancient and modern, just hanging there on expensive walls, those deities just standing there on podiums in the sunshine and looking on? What use was genius, what was the point of godliness slash holiness, if it couldn’t protect a twelve-year-old girl in her own home? Shame on you, artists, gods! Climb down off your pedestals, unhang yourselves, and help! — Nobody helped.”
Shortly after chastising the gods, Miss Salma R reflected on her grandfather’s piety. It was worse than hypocritical:
“He was seen in the gardens only at prayer times — he prayed five times a day, as truly religious people do, and also people in serious need of divine forgiveness — when he brought his little prayer mat, rolled up, to the edge of a sunken pond, unrolled it, faced toward Mecca, and got down on his knees. But as must now regretfully be revealed, he preyed almost as often as he prayed.”
This will be a familiar image to those who grew up surrounded by the pious. Some who worship in sacred places or study religious texts believe they’ve ticked the morality box by engaging in these activities, as if the hard work of living ethically can be shelved in favor of prayer or hymns.
Miss Salma R is haunted by her grandfather’s false faith. She is also haunted by the complicity in her mother’s and grandmother’s silence, another common pattern in real-world abuse cases.
Is it any wonder that between the false faith of her childhood and the false love of her adulthood, Miss Salma R has such a dependence on painkillers? Her family and her fans failed to see her deepest thoughts and struggles. Rushdie returns to the inability of people to see one another repeatedly throughout Quichotte.
Americans Cannot See Each Other
One of the strangest stops on Ismail Smile’s journey is a town in New Jersey where some residents are turning into mastodons, extinct animals similar to mammoths. One of the residents describes the mastodons this way:
“Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense. The mastodons refuse to believe that they have turned into horrible, surrealistic mutants, and they become hostile and aggressive, they take their children out of school, and have contempt for education. My belief is that many of them can still speak English, but they prefer to bellow like badly played flugelhorns. In the first days one or two of them insisted that they were the true Americans, and we were the dinosaurs and ought to be extinct. But after a short time they gave up on talking to us, and just yowled like flugelhorns instead.”
The mastodons are a nod to an allegory about fascism and how formerly normal people embraced radical ideologies and became unrecognizable to their neighbors. It’s a feeling many Americans will recognize after Trump’s election.
Rushdie doesn’t leave on a note of despair. He offers a solution that confronts a world that becomes more complex as it shrinks. Ismail Smile explains to his imaginary son:
“Once,” he said. “people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people’s stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what’s going on in all the boxes we aren’t in, otherwise we don’t know why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected.”
The world looks dramatically different to the different Americas. Democrats failed to answer the job loss caused by China’s manufacturing boom with new economic opportunities. Today, Republicans fail to see that pulling back from the world makes America less safe, not more. Millions of voters are stuck in the middle of parties that answer some needs and fail to offer solutions to others.
Quichotte is a deep, empathetic portrait of America and those who live in it. Above all, Quichotte teaches us to see one other — all of one another. Not just the pretty parts.