“The Golden House” – Obama’s America Facing His Destiny

© Actes Sud

Published in 2017 during the early days of the Trump presidency, The Golden House is more than the story of a family of wealthy immigrants in the Americas. It is the story of an inexorable destiny from which neither the characters nor America seem to be able to escape. Salman Rushdie transposes the Greek tragedy in the New York of the Obama years, until the conflagration.

While “the Trump years” is a page America is closing, she still seems stunned, as if waking up from a strange dream. The opportunity for many to ask the following question: how did Trump get elected in the first place?

In 2016, few observers anticipated the shock of the coming election. Salman Rushdie himself did not conceive of it. Yet it is the outcome, which he had glimpsed in the lines of his novel, written a few weeks before the elections which changed the political panorama of the United States forever.

We are in New York in 2008, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, begins the first of his two terms. This new beginning coincides with that of the Golden, an enigmatic family who sets down their suitcases in MacDougal Street, in the district of Greenwich Village in the heart of Manhattan. From that moment, the life of the peaceful community that lived there changes radically.

From golden destiny …

Like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway who makes us discover Gatsby the magnificent, Rushdie immerses us in the life of the Golden through an outside narrator. René Unterlinden is a young writer who lives in the district, the main theater of the novel. In desperate search of a subject for his film project, the arrival of the Golden in town is a click. They will become the characters in his film. But in spite of himself, René does not manage not to interfere in the history of these men whom he has sworn to observe. By getting too close to the fire, you end up burning yourself, a lesson that our narrator learns the hard way.

“You tell them that we are from nowhere, or from anywhere, or from somewhere, that we are fictional beings, reinvented beings, mutants, in other words Americans”

Nero Golden addressing his sons, The Golden House, Salman Rushdie

These words from Nero, which can be found in the first pages of the story, illustrate well the mysticism that surrounds the newcomers. The new start of Golden men in America, as with many, results in a pushback from the past and a new identity.

Thus Nero Golden, father of the family, reigns over his new palace like an emperor over Rome. He sets foot on his new lands, accompanied by his three sons. The renowned elder Petronius – aka Petya – suffers from agoraphobia. This computer genius remains cloistered in the den of his room, which he does not leave for fear of the outside world. His fight is internal, he will triumph over the course of the novel, but will not have the privilege of enjoying his new freedom.

Apu, his younger brother is the antagonist. Gifted artist, passionate agoraphile whose appetite for New York society in which he flourishes is never empty. He flies from show to show until his ghosts catch up with him. Finally the last, Dionysos, nicknamed D, twenty years younger than his brothers is a dark and endearing boy, ” a sort of Dorian Gray, slender, agile; almost effeminate ».

… to an inescapable tragedy

The Golden are lost souls, pursued by demons from another continent that they have brought in their suitcases. Men who try to seize the opportunity that America offers them to reinvent themselves – starting with their first name. But this new beginning is a dream, an illusion. In reality, they will only lock themselves away more in the tragic destiny promised by their surname.

« So I could throw the whole book away and start writing a new story. That old book wasn’t that good anyway. So that’s what I did, and here I am, and now I see ghosts because the problem, when you try to escape yourself, is that you get carried away in the escape. »

Apu Golden, The Golden House, Salman Rushdie

Irony is a weapon Rushdie likes to use and abuse. Ironically, then: the Golden story is anything but a golden story. The.the. reader.ice – rocked by the mixture of magical realism, oriental references and mythological allusions – discovers over the pages the play which is being played. With accents of a Greek tragedian, Rushdie makes his characters dance like puppets; these very characters who are unaware that they will not be able to escape the fate that destiny has chosen for them. Their fate is inexorable, from the first page to the end. Eight years in which the Golden will have gone from gold to flames.

« The fire licks the margins of my story which is coming to an end and the fire burns, it is inexorable, its hour will come »

The Golden House, Salman Rushdie

A political mirror

And The Golden House seems to be a novel centered on its men, it is the female characters that catalyze the action. The women shine in the story. By their absence first of all, that of mother Golden, at the origin of the family’s presence on the American continent. Then by their importance, in the role they bring to the scenario. Just like the arrival of Vasilisa, a young Russian who will turn Nero’s head and shake up many things in the Golden house.

Another fundamental character is that of Riya, the young girl who works at the – fictitious – museum of identity and who becomes D’s lover and friend, accompanying her in her quest for identity. Indeed, the latter no longer knows where to be in a binary masculine / feminine classification in which he / she no longer finds himself. It is Riya who will be, in this trip, both his guide and his pillar for better or for worse: “Being born male doesn’t make you a man. Unless you decide ” she said to him.

Through the character of D, Rushdie seeks to convey a political message. That of a democratization of dialogue around gender concepts and their questioning. The need to go beyond an archaic binary classification in which many no longer recognize themselves. Fight carried by a whole youth in search of meaning, seeking its place in a world which is slow to evolve and reinvent itself. This same world – like the American society that Rushdie stages – which seems to tend towards the scenarios that the illustrious Greek tragedians could have written in their time.

« Tragedy is the irruption of the inexorable into human affairs which can come from outside (a hereditary curse) or from within (a character defect) but, in any case, events follow. their inevitable course »

The Golden House, Salman Rushdie

The portrait of an America close to conflagration

Few authors have an aura that goes beyond their works like Salman Rushdie. Capable of mixing places and times with a maestria that characterizes his pen, the writer of Indian origin is known as much for his books as for the assassination attempts he has been subjected to for over thirty years.

In 1989, Imam Khomeini pronounced the fatwa and sentences Rushdie to death, the fault of his latest novel, The Satanic Verses. Khomeini calls on his followers around the world to assassinate the writer, as well as all those who would directly or indirectly touch this book, considered blasphemous. Laurent Binet, in a paper for the January issue of Diplomatic world comes back to this episode: “One of the most beautiful novels of the end of the 20th century will never be on the aggregation’s comparative literature program. Rushdie will never get the Nobel Prize. “

“Charb, Cabu, Wolinski and their friends died so that Rushdie could live. Rushdie is still alive, but throughout those thirty-two years, during which Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, was assassinated, his Italian translator stabbed and his Norwegian editor shot three times (these two survived), the premium for his assassination has steadily increased. “

Laurent Binet, Back to “The Satanic Verses”, The diplomatic world, January 2021

But Rushdie wouldn’t be Rushdie if he weren’t a fierce defender of human rights, a standard-bearer of free speech and a shrewd critic of the society of his day. Living in the United States since 2000 and holding American nationality, Rushdie puts the vices of American society under the criticism of his pen.

With The Golden House, he paints a remarkable portrait from the early Obama years to the cataclysm of Trump’s election. Election of which he makes himself the prophet in spite of himself, staging in his novel the double – prophetic – of Donald Trump: the Joker. In a climate of chaos and debacle, he manages to snatch victory and ascend to the presidency. Scenario that will become reality in November 2016.

“Outside, it was the world of the Joker, the world of what had become of American reality, that is to say a kind of radical lie: hypocrisy, vulgarity, bigotry, rudeness, violence, paranoia …”

The Golden House, Salman Rushdie

That’s Rushdie magic too: words that only take on meaning after being written, after the realization of the dreaded future they let perceive. The irony of history suffered by one of its most ardent users: Salman Rushdie, the man who has had so much trouble with the prophets, is the one who, in spite of himself, prophesied the coming of Trump to power. Like his characters, fate played a bad turn on the writer himself.

The Golden House of Salman Rushdie, Actes Sud, 23 euros.

–