Hypnotism as Narrative Technique in Salman Rushdie’s Shame
Written by Daniel Seely and Nick Lemberis
Strutting through the night with your buddies, you’re young, alive, and looking for a good time, then, out of the dark a slender burqa-clad woman walks in your direction. A flicker of excitement races down your neck, ends up somewhere near your waist; you feel the same kind of subtle animation emanating from your three friends as she approaches. Quiet. Dark. Mysterious. You wonder what she’ll say, hoping beyond hope her shroud is not in fact some sort of religious barrier, but is merely just cloth. However before any further thinking happens, her shadowed eyes erupt into orbs of deep, consuming fire, and you and your friends are led and, willingly, follow her to a city dump. Once there, you each do her bidding and take a turn, one at a time, having sex with her in the dirt and open trash-smelling air. Now with the deed done, you all flaccidly stand by as she works her way down the line tearing off one head and then another until nothing is left except four headless bodies and pints of spilt blood.
As ridiculous as this previous paragraph sounds, this is the overall premise of a scene from Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. I took the liberty to embellish and expound on this particular situation with a between-the-lines reading of the thoughts and emotions of these boys as they encounter one of the book’s main protagonists, Sufiya Zinobia, but the presence of hypnosis is clearly evident in Rushdie’s portrayal of this grisly and unbecoming event.
Hypnotism as a Tool to Progress Rushdie’s Plot
Hypnotism is interspersed throughout the plot line of Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame through the mediums of Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia. Omar is actually a hypnotist, something that reinforces the quality of shamelessness, which he embodies. By contrast, Sufiya Zinobia is the actual embodiment of shame in the novel; she is shame personified by the use of metaphor. Sufiya’s character sometimes seems to be hypnotized; at other times, she acts as a hypnotist. However, Salman Rushdie does not strictly adhere to the lines that differentiate the facts from the fiction of hypnotism where Omar and Sufiya are concerned, but rather, capitalizes on both realities and fantasies to progress his novel.
Hypnotism has a dark allure to it, and there is thrilling excitement attached to the notion of stepping out of this reality and visiting the realms of the fantastic for a brief period. The beliefs that hypnotism does not work, is all a phony act for entertainment purposes, or is a form of medical quackery are all prevalent in modern times and likewise have been around for centuries. Hypnotism has been used in association with sorcery, magic, the occult, and medicine as well as the interesting theory of animal magnetism, but the practice of hypnosis does in fact occupy a solid space in legitimate medical treatments and practices. While hypnosis is not a form of psychotherapy, it can be effectively used in conjunction with other treatments and therapies to treat pain, depression, anxiety, and phobias among other ailments.
A Brief Background of Hypnosis
Hypnosis has traveled all over the world from ancient Egypt to the Greek and Roman empires and so on. Hypnosis started thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, around 1550 AD. The ancient Egyptians did not actually call it hypnosis, though they referred to it as an altered state of consciousness. The Egyptians even had special sleep temples they used for this type of hypnotic healing. Between the ages of 460–377 BC, the father of medicine, Hippocrates, became one of the first men to realize the power behind the subconscious mind: “He maintained that our feelings and emotions arise in the brain, and the brain controls our body”. Since Hippocrates was able to realize the power behind the brain he could use hypnosis to achieve healing in a form like mind over body. Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer was the first person to systematically use hypnosis for curative purposes in the years 1720–1792. However, it was not until Dr. James Braid came along in the years 1720–1860 that it was actually called hypnosis. Braid came up with the name hypnotism after the Greek God of sleep Hypnos.
Ancient Egyptians were not the only people to use hypnosis; many people throughout time such as Native Americans, Asians, Africans, and Indians used this state of altered consciousness or controlled forms of sleep to heal. Indians also practiced what they called sammohan which is what they referred to as self-hypnosis. Sammohan can be dated back to the Vedic times in India which ranged from 1500–500 B.C. Many yogis, which were yoga practitioners, and rishis, which were Hindu saints or sages, used self-hypnosis to help calm their minds during meditation. India also had another type of hypnosis called vashikaran which uses two words Vashi and Karan, which mean control and act. Unlike sammohan, vashikaran was used to control others. Vashikaran supposedly could be used for controlling spouses, government officials, loved ones, and it could even make enemies mind their own business if they were trying to cause trouble to the Indian people. Not much else is known about how hypnosis came to India.
The Hynotized and the Hypnotizer In Shame
In Rushdie’s novel, Omar first discovers the practice of hypnosis at a young age while searching through his grandfather’s library. He finds books that contain information on the subject steeped in religious practices, exorcisms, and a book on the theory of Franz Mesmer as well as instructional information on how to hypnotize people. Rushdie’s narrator subtly foreshadows future events and places a slight enmity to the subject in the reader’s mind with the statement that the “arcane science…has so awesome a power for good or ill.” Shortly after this the reader sees Omar use hypnosis to seduce or coerce a girl to have sex with him. Now, it is true that when a person is in a hypnotic trance the person can break free of the trance at any point and cannot be forced to do anything that is against her morals or that she is specifically unwilling to do; the person is just more susceptible or open to suggestions. This truth fits almost perfectly with Omar’s justifications of his actions when he claims that, “You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to do nothing that you will be unwilling to do” and “Impossible to persuade a subject to do anything she is unwilling to do” in relation to his philandering escapades later on in life. The latter is completely true and puts Omar in the clear with defining the sex as consensual, but the first statement is worded subversively and implies that he could persuade a person with the help of hypnosis to do something that she would not normally do. At any rate, Omar’s use of hypnosis to put him in a better position to have sex with women is unsavory and underscores the shameless attribute that Rushdie applies to Omar.
Towards the end of the novel, Rushdie acknowledges hypnotism’s medical merit by showing the reader Omar’s attempt to use hypnosis in a medical context on Sufiya Zinobia. The attempt fails because Sufiya is wholly unwilling, but the medical merit of hypnosis is also minutely slighted because Sufiya is described as being possessed by a beast and being something that is not natural. This hearkens back to myths surrounding the occult and ideas that cannot be scientifically proven, thus subliminally undermining the medical credibility that was freshly attached to hypnotism by Rushdie.
Sufiya Zinobia displays forms of hypnosis and hypnotism that are in line with the mythical aspects of the subject. This is a natural utilization of the varying fallacies concerning hypnotism when it is taken into account that Rushdie has created Sufiya as shame’s incarnate. She is something that is real but is at the same time something that does not exist in this form in reality, so it is appropriate to give her attributes that cannot happen in reality but are derivative from a real thing. It is suggested that Sufiya has the power to self-hypnotize, and it is expressly stated that she can hypnotize subjects against their will and force them to carry out actions as she did when hypnotizing the young boys with her eyes and then killing them.
Interjecting Pakistan
Rushdie configures Sufiya in a manner that includes ideas that are implausible in real life but yet are still grounded in a premise and structure that is entirely real. This is particularly interesting when the notion of the nation of Pakistan in Shame is considered. In the novel, Pakistan is a fictionalized country comprised of different people forced together in an outlandish act that pushes pre-existing realities to the wayside with the hope that this new and fantastical idea of a nation — which has been jumbled together with a blatant disregard to the real — will overcome the obstacles of reality and succeed in its fantasy-laden hope. By grossly exaggerating the false and unreal characteristics associated with hypnotism through the medium of Sufiya Zinobia, Rushdie paints the reality of Pakistan in a sharp and harsh light. Whereas Sufiya highlights the overextension of unrealities that are tangent to the real, Omar Khayyam portrays the bastardization of a reality that at heart, but often not in practice, is pure. Rushdie’s use of specific acts of hypnosis as well as the general concept of the science help move his story along, but also artfully reveals the dichotomy inherent in the nation of Pakistan: a reality trampled upon by the focus on and utilization of implausible hopes and acts that are tangent to what is real but still not quite intersecting reality.
Finally, here is an interesting clip from the show “Scrubs” that shows a patient choosing to use hypnosis over anesthesia for an appendectomy.
