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''Grimus'' is a 1975 fantasy and science fiction novel by Salman Rushdie. It was his literary debut. The story loosely follows Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. After drinking the fluid, Flapping Eagle wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities before falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea. He arrives in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island where those immortals who have tired of the world but are reluctant to give up their immortality exist in a static community under a subtle and sinister authority. Published in 1975, ''Grimus'' was Salman Rushdie's first published novel. To a large extent it has been disparaged by academic critics; though Peter Kemp's comment is particularly vitriolic, it does give an idea of the novel's initial reception:〔"Losing the plot", Peter Kemp, ''The Sunday Times,'' 4 April 1999〕 :"His first novel, ''Grimus'' (1975), a ramshackle surreal saga based on a 12th-century Sufi poem and copiously encrusted with mythic and literary allusion, nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision." ==Style== Amongst other influences Rushdie incorporates Sufi, Hindu, Christian and Norse mythologies alongside pre- and post-modernist literature into his construction of character and narrative form. ''Grimus'' was created with the intention of competing for Rushdie's then publisher, Victor Gollancz Ltd.’s ‘Science Fiction Prize.’ As an intended work of science fiction it is comparable to David Lindsay's ''Voyage to Arcturus'' in that there is very little actual science fiction. Rather inter-dimensional/interstellar travelling provides a narrative framework that loosely accords to the bildungsroman narrative form to allegorically encounter and investigate multiple social ideologies whilst in a search for a coherent centre of identity. It can be seen as growing out of and extending the techniques and the literary traditions identified with Jonathan Swift's ''Gulliver's Travels'', or Sir Thomas More's ''Utopia'', in that its journey traverses both outer and inner dimensions, exploring both cultural ideologies and the ambivalent effects that they have on one's psychological being. Like much of Rushdie's work, ''Grimus'' undermines the concept of a 'pure culture' by demonstrating the impossibility of any culture, philosophy or weltanschauung existing in sterile isolation. This profoundly post-structuralist approach gains overt expression, for example, in Virgil's comment on the limitations of aesthetic theories that attempt to suppress their own contingencies; ‘Any intellect which confines itself to mere structuralism is bound to rest trapped in its own webs. Your words serve only to spin cocoons around your own irrelevance.’ (p. 91 ) Further, in ''Grimus'' the habits that communities adopt to prevent themselves from acknowledging multiplicity gain allegorical representation in the Way of K. The Way of K may be seen as Rushdie probing the Rousseau-influenced theories of man and society that influenced much post-18th century Western travel writing and the modernist influenced literature of 1930s England in particular. In light of this, we can see Rushdie as having produced what Linda Hutcheon terms a 'histiographic novel.'〔Linda Hutcheon, ''The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction'' (London: Routledge, 1988) p.5〕 That is, novels that explore and undermine concepts of stable cultural origins of identity. Like his later work ''Midnight's Children'', with ''Grimus'' Rushdie draws attention to the provisional status of his text’s ‘truth’ and thus the provisional status of any received account of reality, by using meta-texts that foreground the unnaturalness and bias of the text’s construction as an entity. For example, Grimus’s epilogue includes a quotation from one of its own characters. Thus, the text revolves around the ‘symptoms of blindness which mark its conceptual limits’ rather than the direct expression of didactic insights.〔Christopher Norris, ''Deconstruction; Theory and Practice'' ed. T. Hawkes (London: Methuen,1982), p.23〕 Rushdie has argued that ‘one of the things that have happened in the 20th century is a colossal fragmentation reality.’〔(in Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya and Salman Rushdie (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1993), p.154 )〕 Hence, like Gabriel García Márquez, ''Grimus'' incorporates Magic Realism to transgress distinctions of genres, which mirrors ‘the state of confusion and alienation that defines postcolonial societies and individuals.’〔Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya and Salman Rushdie (Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p.143〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Grimus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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