While Grass writes against the political abuse of folk culture in Nazi Germany, Bulgakov writes against the suppression of the Christian myth following the Communist revolution. In both books, myth is disentangled from the grasp of ideological abuse. This also happens in Rushdie’s books, both in Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses. As Grass’s The Tin Drum draws on previous texts, it becomes the palimpsest for later texts. Salman Rushdie openly admitted to having been influenced by Grass.^[14] The parallels between these two authors are legion. While Grass juxtaposes Germans and Poles, one of Rushdie’s central themes is the relationship between Muslims and Hindus. The works of both writers display a high degree of intertextuality and heterogeneity and both have provoked strong reactions from the people who do not agree with their use of blasphemy and sacrilege, although arguably conservative reactions to Grass’s The Tin Drum in places like Bavaria in the early 1960s and Oklahoma in the mid-1990s fade in comparison with the fatwa which Khomeini placed on Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989. One of the most interesting connections between The Tin Drum and Midnight’s Children is their fantastic realism, their revival of the picaresque tradition. Most of Rushdie’s characters display the kind of homelessness of which Bakhtin speaks, the dubious origin of the picaro, that great blasphemer in world literature. We realise to what extent the picaro himself stems from an intercultural archetype that transcends Europe, the mythological trickster, whose central function is to criticise society from its margins. As tricksters, Oskar Matzerath and Saleem Sinai, the hero of Midnight’s Children, have in common that they are equipped with magic weapons allowing them to commit deeds of blasphemy and sacrilege. What is Oskar’s scream, by which he destroys the glass in churches, is Saleem’s extremely sensitive nose that allows him to smell the thoughts of people. As tricksters, they are marginalised, figures on the threshold, and find themselves in what the anthropologist Victor Turner has called a zone of liminality.^[15] It is precisely from their liminal position that they are able to levy acts of blasphemy criticising official ideologies, the times in which they live. Both stand on the threshold between two historical ages, Nazism and post-war Germany on the one hand, India as a British colony and postcolonial India on the other. Both texts revolve around the Stunde Null, the zero hour of the nation state, 1945 in Germany and 1947, the day of Indian Independence. 1945 marks the date when Oskar is transformed into a grotesquely misshapen dwarf, while precisely at the stroke of midnight preceding Indian independence, Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai is born together with the other thousand midnight children. What moves these two novels into close proximity is the grotesque body of the protagonist and their grotesque, sacrilegious representation of history. While Oskar’s hump is a symbol of German guilt that he carries on his shoulders and while his deformity also reflects the ugliness of Germany after 1945, Saleem Sinai, whose physiognomy resembles that of the Hindu Elephant God Ganesha, carries the very shape of the Indian subcontinent in his face, as his teacher Zagallo points out with his Peruvian accent:

The text abounds in ‘images of the grotesque body draining into the world’ which serve ‘a Menippean vision of renewal and progress’ that is ‘referentially directed towards the qualities of Indian society that Rushdie valorises: pluralism, democracy, hybridity, and change’ and they satirically attack the ‘forces in modern India and Pakistan that deny those principles: fundamentalism, despotism, purity, and stasis’.^[17]

The representation of history in Midnight’s Children is steeped as much in folk culture as that of The Tin Drum. In a conversation that Grass and Rushdie had in the mid-1980s, they both admitted to each other that their use of the fantastic and of the fairy-tale world stems from their cultures’ individual literary heritage. While Rushdie emphasises the importance of the Arabian Nights for his novel, of the stories of A Thousand and One Nights, Grass’s literature is deeply rooted in the German Baroque and Romantic tradition, the picaresque novel and the fairy tales. Like Grass, who destabilises the mendacity of post-fascist rationalism, Rushdie attempts to subvert the official view of Indian history as a success story, as what Nietzsche called ‘monumental history’, the history of India’s great leaders.^[18] Against this monumental vision of India’s history, Rushdie offers his critical view of history. The story of Saleem Sinai is the story of India’s common people. Like Grass, Rushdie thus reinstalls ‘low’ culture over ‘high’ culture, elevates the marginalised over those at the centres of power. The subversion of an official discourse is, in both cases, achieved specifically through the sacrilegious conflation of important historical events with the banality of the protagonist’s private life and through a revival of myth and irrationalism suppressed by both new states, both under Adenauer’s politics of rationalism and Nehru’s secularisation. In order to show how ludicrous the concept of the Stunde Null, the zero hour, this sort of tabula rasa made of Nazism or colonialism, really is, Rushdie recycles a central scene from Grass, the Onion Cellar episode, which resurfaces as Mumbai’s ‘Midnite Confidential Club’. Both authors want to bring back the past and understand that nothing will disappear, everything will come back. What is catharsis through onions in Grass corresponds to Rushdie’s chutney, the sweetsour ‘chutney of memory’.

Preserving the past is a concern in all three books. Rushdie’s image of the pickling factory that Saleem works in is a fitting motif for this chutneyfication of history and the narrator compares his thirty chapters with pickle jars in which the past is preserved. Grass, Bulgakov, and Rushdie engage in myth in order to preserve the past and a cultural heritage that the great rulers of their countries threaten either to manipulate or to suppress. Grass offers his vision of myth and folk culture in opposition to the Nazis’ ideological manipulation of myth and folk culture and the spirit of rationalism under Adenauer. By way of parody, Bulgakov reinstalls central icons of the Christian myth in opposition to Stalin’s imposed atheism. Rushdie writes in opposition to Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi’s suppression of Hindu and Muslim traditionalism for the sake of their monumental vision of history that focuses on the great leaders but not on the people. In Midnight’s Children, he revives Hindu myth, for example, in the character of the Widow who drains all hope from the 1001 children born at the stroke of midnight of 15 August 1947, the day of Indian Independence from colonial rule. This figure can serve as a pars pro toto to demonstrate that this novel is a work of magic realism, for, at a realistic level, the Widow symbolises Indira Gandhi and her rule of terror during the Emergency period (1975–77), while at the level of myth, she is made to resemble the evil goddess Kali, who is often represented ‘with protruding tongue, garland of skulls, and hands holding weapons and severed heads, stark naked upon the prostrate body of her beloved consort Shiva’.^[19]

This revival of Hinduism becomes even more problematic in The Satanic Verses where, in truly satirical manner, elements are shamelessly mixed, in this case the blasphemous mixing of religious icons. When the Muslim Gibreel, one of the two central characters, enters the film world, one of his first roles is to play the Hindu god Ganesha, with elephant trunk and large ears. Later, he metamorphises into Hanuman, the monkey king from the epic Ramayana. Rushdie’s deconstruction of the dictatorial politics of the Indian film industry reminds us of Grass’s and Bulgakov’s parody of monological prose like the Bildungsroman of German Classicism and Socialist Realism, but among the greatest offences is Rushdie’s mixing Islam with Hinduism.

In conclusion, one could argue that the literature of magic realism attacks primarily the official discourses of the church and the state. In this satirical literature, which is steeped in earlier European traditions such as the menippean satire or the picaresque novel, blasphemy and sacrilege, the rupturing of the sacred realm (church and state) through the profane (pro-fanum), are levelled against the Church’s and the State’s mechanisms of oppression. If we believe with Horkheimer and Adorno in the dialectic of Enlightenment, this implies that reason can become oppressive, that rationalism can reach a point at which it perverts into irrationalism, which no doubt it did under totalitarian rule. In the fiction of magic realism, Western rationalism becomes the target of satirical representations of irrationalism. What Deleuze and Guattari have, in their book Mille Plateaux, called the arborescence of Western societies, the deep roots of their teleologies and their territorialism, is being subverted through what they call the rhizome, the shallow roots associated with deterritorialisation, nomadism, and homelessness, for which tricksters, picaros, and other literary nomads are literary representations. In this body of literature, the official world is always being subverted through modes of the rhizome. We encounter these two realms, Deleuze’s arborescence versus rhizomatics, in authors like Grass, Irving, Rushdie, Tournier, Garcia Marquez, but also in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, to add an example from Australia, where the rhizomatic world of the indigenous peoples clashes with Western racism and its arborescence. As jazz and blues are part of the rhizomatic world giving tragicomic hope to African Americans so are the songlines, that intricate web of dreaming paths as the manifestation of an ancient nomadic culture. The trickster and the picaro are the great wanderers and blasphemers of the mythological and fictional world challenging the Gods, the rulers, and the sedentary bourgeois who hold still in the face of misrule. A question that remains is: Who will write the great heteroglot novel that parodies the Bush era and America’s foreign policy? To date it has not yet been produced.