Posted Wednesday morning, December 11, 2019.
In “Quichotte”, Salman Rushdie’s retelling of “Don Quixote”, set in the United States of the 21st Century, his version of Cervantes mad knight, an elderly traveling pharmaceutical salesman named Quichotte, who’s had his brain melted by watching too much TV in motel rooms across the country, and his Sancho, the much wished-for teenage son he’s imagined into rebellious existence, are about to enter New York City, home of Quichotte’s Dulcinea, Salma R, a former Bollywood star turned Oprah-level popular talk show host. Quichotte explains to Sancho what lies before them: two New York Cities, an invisible, ideal one, and a “real” one that acts as a shield against entry to the ideal city by the unimaginative, unappreciative, and unworthy. Here’s Quichotte’s description of the “real” New York City. You’ll see why I keep putting “real” in quotation marks:
“There are two cities,” Quichotte said. “There’s the one you can see, the broken sidewalks of the old place and the steel skeletons of the new, lights in the sky, garbage in the gutters, the new music of the sirens and power drills, and old man tap-dancing for change, whose feet say, I used to be somebody, but his eyes say, no more, buster, no more. The flow of the avenues and the clogged-up streets. A mouse sailing a boat on a pond in the park, a guy with a mohawk screaming at a yellow cab. Made men with napkins tucked in under their chins in a red-sauce joint in Harlem. Wall Street guy in suspenders getting bottle service in nightclubs or doing tequila shots and throwing themselves at women as if they were banknotes. Tall women, short bald guys, strip steaks, strip joints. Empty storefronts, closing sales, everything must go, a smile missing some of its best teeth. Construction everywhere but still the steam pipes burst. Ringleted men with a million bucks in diamonds in the pockets of their long black quotes. Brownstones. Music. Food. Drugs. Homeless folks. Twenty years ago they were gone but now they’re back. Snow plows, baseball, police cars promising CPA, courtesy, professionalism, respect, what can I tell you, they have a sense of humor. Every language on earth, Russian, Punjabi, Taishanese, Creole, Yiddish, Kru. Also, let us not forget the beating heart of the television industry. Colbert at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Noah in Hell’s Kitchen, The View, The Chew, Seth Meyers, Fallon, everybody. Smiling lawyers on cable saying they can make you a fortune if you get hurt. Rock Center, CNN, Fox. The warehouse downtown where they shoot the Salma show. The streets she walks, the car she goes home in, the elevator to her penthouse, the restaurants she orders from, the places she knows, the places she goes. The people who know her number. The things that please her. The whole ugly-pretty city, beautiful in its ugliness, jolie-laide, that’s French, like the statue in the harbor. All this is there to see.”
“And the other city?” Sancho asked, frowning. “Because that’s a lot right there.”
“The other city is invisible,” Quichotte replied…
Quichotte’s description of the City builds towards Salma and the City as she knows it. His “real” New York City is real to him because it’s her home and where he expects to meet her in person---he has sought her, sung her, dreamed her, known her with all of his heart though they have been always apart to this point---and declare his love at last. But that doesn’t change the fact that his description of New York City is realistic---as long as you ignore that includes Stuart Little.
It also includes Tony Soprano---or is it Michael Corleone?---Travis Bickle, and Bo Jangles. When you remember that throughout, Quichotte's view of life is determined by what he’s watched on TV and the books he’s read---he’s well and widely read---and that his favorite television show is “Law & Order: SVU”---Mariska Hargitay was his first Dulcinea until he saw Salma on Salma---you realize that his “real” New York City is a jumbled conflation of images from TV, movies, books, and newspapers and news shows. And those images pile on top of other images so that the references contain references to references. The guy with mohawk is a reference to “Taxi Driver” but the most famous movie or TV character to yell at a yellow cab isn’t Travis Bickle, it’s Ratso Rizzo. Followed by Oscar Maddison.
And, of course, his Salma is herself a figment of his imagination.
But here’s the thing.
While all the images in Quichotte’s real New York City are conjured from his overstuffed imagination, they’re at the same time things you can see in the real real New York, and I’m not automatically excluding the mouse in a toy sailboat on a pond in Central Park. The guy with a mohawk screaming at a yellow cab is, in various shapes a sizes, a regular sight on street corners in every neighborhood and borough every day of the week, every hour of every day. But it’s almost impossible to see him apart from Bickle and Rizzo and Madison, as not in a scene from “Taxi Driver”, “Midnight Cowboy”, or “The Odd Couple.” You can’t see New York City---be in New York City---without seeing “New York City” and being in “New York City” as it appears in “On the Town”, “On the Waterfront”, “Do the Right Thing”, “The Godfather”, “Serpico”, “Manhattan”, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “The Apartment”, “West Side Story”, “Ghostbusters”, “Spider-Man”, and “Law & Order”. By you, of course, I mean me. Your New York City is made up out of your own cinematic allusions, along with memories of the books you’ve read, the news stories you were struck by and that stuck with you, the tales you’ve been told, the visits you made, the life you lived there, the life you’re living there, the songs it makes you sing, the music you hear in the air...
All cities and places---and all people too---are far more than the measurable, quantifiable, historically and journalistically accurate and verifiable facts about them.
Every place we go, every person we know, is an amalgam of the physically present present and the imagined and remembered whenever.
What’s “real” to us is made up of the real and the unreal. The people we know and love, or hate, or take for granted, we love, hate, or take for granted because of what we remember about them, other people they remind us of, events we associate with them, and the attendant emotions those memories, reminders, and associations they recall. It’s the same with places. It works the other way too. Our reactions to movies, stories, songs, memories, and imaginings, and our feelings and thinking about them are shaped by our experiences in the “real” world.
That’s why we have to discipline our thinking, why we have to be careful with whom and with what we compare our thoughts and against which we measure our judgments.
"Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so," says Hamlet. I’d edit that to "Nothing is but thinking makes it so, at least when seen from our personal certain point of view.
Which reminds me of something else I like about Quichotte's description of New York City to Sancho: Obi-wan and Luke on the hill above Mos Eisley.
"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be careful."
I feel that way about New York sometimes. It's part of its attraction.
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"Quichotte: A Novel" by Salman Rushdie is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.
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