Metamorphosis and Hybridity within The Firebird’s Nest by Salman Rushdie

Metamorphosis and Hybridity within The Firebird’s Nest by Salman Rushdie 

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed  

Into different bodies. 

- Ovid, The Metamorphoses 

In a tale that explores ideas of cultural hybridity, I found the inclusion of metamorphosis an interesting choice by Salman Rushdie. By definition, these two figures of transformation, metamorphosis and hybridity, are not alike. First of all metamorphosis is an event whilst hybridity is a state: ‘metamorphosis itself is the event of transformation…hybridity is the condition brought about by the transformation, not the event itself’ (Hix 274). Hix also raises the temporal differences between hybridity and metamorphoses suggesting that typically metamorphosis is a sudden occurrence whilst hybridity occurs gradually over time. In addition to this metamorphosis has long been considered part of the mythical or fantastical world whilst hybridity is a concept present in the world today.

 Considering these differences, it is easy to question why Rushdie would combine metamorphosis with a theme such as hybridity for surely it would lessen any realist notions in his work. Yet I would argue far from forcing Rushdie’s story into the fairy tale tradition, his metamorphosis imagery visually realises difficult discourses on hybridity thus making the real more transparent.                 

 The magical atmosphere of Rushdie’s tale with its allusions to princes and princesses and enchanting kingdoms of old irresistibly draws the reader into the realm of the traditional fairy tale: 

‘Here Mr Maharaj is still the prince, and she, his new princess. As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a page, or as though she were becoming that page itself’ (Rushdie 47)

This is the perfect setting for metamorphosis. Metamorphosis has spanned the fairy tale genre throughout literary history: frogs and beasts become princes, lemons are cut open to reveal beautiful women, lizards are transformed into footmen and mermaids grow legs to become human. As Marina Warner in her book Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds observes: ‘metamorphosis is a defining dynamic of certain kinds of stories - myths and wonder tales, fairy stories and magic realist novels’ (Warner 18). Therefore one might surmise that Rushdie deliberately gives his otherwise realist novel a fairy tale like atmosphere so that metamorphosis, the Firebird, might be introduced.  What is created is a tale of liminality: the story takes place on the borders of realism and fantasy, past and present, India and America.                             

   A recurring example of metamorphosis in the story is the spontaneous combustion of women. It is strongly reminiscent of the Asian ritual of sati, self-immolation by women who had lost their husbands. In The Firebird’s Nest ‘the combustibility of women is a source of resigned wonder to the men’, and yet, I would argue that the women in the story do not so much catch fire as become fire (Rushdie 18). Woman-into-fire becomes an image of metamorphosis.  They have ‘fiery hearts’ and this transformation is ‘their fate, their nature’ (Rushdie 48). The allusion to ‘fate’ and ‘nature’ associates strongly with Warner’s concept of metamorphosis as stages leading to a ‘perfected outcome’ (Warner 24). Warner’s ‘linear concept of progress through a series of shed skins’ resulting in the ‘perfected outcome’ is inspired by biological metamorphosis: the process through which an animal physically develops after birth, with the final stage  being the “perfect” adult stage (Warner 24). Applying these ideas to The Firebird’s Nest, the ‘fiery hearts’ of the women can be seen as their perfect form and their human bodies as the skin they have to shed to reach it. However, one must also remember that fire is not their final form. At the end of the tale we witness new metamorphosis as the women transform into a cascade of water: ‘they feel the frontiers of their bodies burst and the waters pour out’ (Rushdie 63). 

Warner suggests that metamorphosis is an occurrence most often associated with ambivalent, or cross-cultural worlds: ‘tales of metamorphosis often arose in spaces (temporal, geographical and mental) that were crossroads, cross-cultural zones,  points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures’ (Warner 17). This rings strikingly similar to Bhabha’s concept of “the third space”, the ambivalent ‘interstitial’ space where cultural identity emerges or is negotiated: ‘neither a new horizon nor a leaving behind of the past... the moment of transit where space and time cross’ (Bhabha 1). For Bhabha, that cultural identity is formed in this “third space” the idea of a “pure” culture is unsustainable. The cultural identity that emerges from the interstitial space where the overlapping of class, gender, race, nation or location may occur is the “hybrid”. Thus one can observe that both metamorphosis and hybridity occur in ambivalent spaces.  

  One might argue that within ambivalent spaces form ambivalent identities. Questions of identity are inextricably bound up with ideas of metamorphosis and hybridity. Whether the absolute transformation of metamorphosis, in which one form replaces another, or the joining of two forms to create a third, a hybrid, transformation raises the question as to what – in terms of identity – is lost or gained.  Examples of metamorphosis throughout literary history suggest only the original body is lost and that the individual retains their ability to think and feel as before.  If we take Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Rushdie’s archetype: ‘the spirit comes and goes, Is housed wherever it will, shifts residence From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always It keeps on living’, then we can assume that the transformations that occur in the tale are purely physical (Ovid 370). And so whilst the physical form may change - man into firebird, woman into fire - the ‘spirit’ within ‘keeps on living’. Consequently, Metamorphosis in The Firebird’s Nest does not strip those who transform of their agency. As Mr Maharaj transforms into the firebird ‘his eyes blaze [and] his words hang in the air’ as he proceeds to burn his sister (Rushdie 63). One could perhaps argue that the ‘words [hanging] in the air’ become a visualisation of the identity that remains, simply ‘housed’ in another form.  Likewise the women in the tale who transform into both fire and water, retain their ‘fiery hearts’; their anger and desire for revenge is not quelled by their metamorphosis.                   

  In hybridity, however, the new creation is not purely the things it was formed from; it retains part of each whilst also existing as something entirely new. In light of this, I would suggest that Metamorphosis, being a complete and spontaneous event, has a reversible quality which Hybridity does not. Hybridity effects a permanent change on one’s identity. Therefore, whilst metamorphosis is a figure of transformation apt to deal with physical change, hybridity is better suited as a representation of those changes that may go unseen. For example, the American woman at the centre of Rushdie’s short tale undergoes changes that cause her to hold an ambivalent position. Her physical move from America to India as Mr.Maharaj’s wife is one that decentres her identity. She is now to live what Bhabha calls a ‘border li[fe]’, existing between two contrary homelands, the homeland of her old life and the homeland of her husband and her new life (Bhabha 1). The protagonist’s ambivalent position is echoed in the contraries that follow her throughout the story: ‘It is so hot. She shivers’, ‘Though he calls her his bride, she is not his wife’, ‘she cries dry tears’, ‘She is rich; she is a fertile land… No, she is poor … the drought is in her body’ (Rushdie 47-55). Through these descriptions Rushdie is defining her character through contraries; she exists in the ‘beyond’ the ‘in-between state of transition’ (Bhabha 1). Her geographical crossing of borders therefore begins her journey of hybridity. Hix observes ‘hybridity … occurs gradually’ (Hix 275) and Rushdie’s representation of the personal transformation of his protagonist is true to this. At the beginning, the American believes The Firebird is ‘just an old wives’ tale’, she longs for America and ‘reification of the real’, and talks of her child ‘know[ing] both cultures’ (Rushdie 61). At the end of the novel, she is one of the scorned wives of India’s culture, ‘reification of the real’ is needed no longer as ‘something loosens within the American…some limit of possibility [is] passed’ and she talks not of her child ‘knowing’ both cultures but being ‘both fire and rain’.

  Ultimately, she embraces her liminal position, she moves away from defining herself or her child by the ‘diversity of cultures’ but by ‘culture’s hybridity’. Her child won’t just know of fire and rain but be fire and rain. This acceptance of hybridity is visually realised by Rushdie through images of metamorphosis, that in themselves parallel a verse by Gloria Anzaldua in her book Borderlands/ La Frontera: 

 “To survive the Borderlands

 You must live sin fronteras 

 be a crossroads” (217 Anzaldua)

  These lines appear to suggest that in order to survive in ambivalent spaces - the worlds created by colonialism, the magic realist setting of Rushdie’s novel, Bhabha’s transcultural “third space” - one must embrace hybridity; living ‘sin fronteras’ - without borders. Imagery of breaking or transgressing borders is one that appears frequently in Rushdie’s tale. Logical boundaries are broken in the instances of metamorphosis along with physical, bodily, boundaries: ‘as the wings burst out of him’, ‘they feel the frontiers of their bodies burst’ (Rushdie 63). Thus through the imagery of metamorphosis Rushdie is able to visually depict the breaking of boundaries that must occur if hybridity is to succeed. And so, in a subversion of tradition, Rushdie’s use of the fantastical actually adds to his realist portrayal of hybridity. It is stated in the tale itself: ‘Do not mistake the abnormal for the untrue. We are caught in metaphors. They transfigure us, and reveal the meaning of our lives’ (Rushdie 61). In The Firebird’s Nest Rushdie uses the ‘abnormal’ - the firebird and the metamorphosis of woman into fire and water – to unveil previously hidden truths, the American protagonist and the Indian women discover their strength to break boundaries and upturn cultural traditions. In essence then, Rushdie uses a hybrid form to explore hybridity. Through mixing the abnormal and the normal he makes the images of metamorphosis part of the tale’s own hybridity, simultaneously ensuring it does not only not feel out of place within the story but that it has a function. I would argue in a tale bound up with questions of identity, metamorphosis was in fact the perfect lens through which to explore hybridity.

PLEASE NOTE:  Metamorphosis and Hybridity within The Firebird’s Nest by Salman Rushdie by Annabelle May Hawkes is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0