The Danger of Imbalance

Madness.  It is a common human experience, whether it is as frequent as a daily occurrence or only once in one’s life.  It can take the form of a momentary, silly thought, or that of a completely dehabilitating and even life-threatening experience.  The one thing that can be said for sure about madness is that it is focused around balance, or the lack thereof, in an aspect of one’s life.  Salman Rushdie’s “The Harmony of the Spheres” in his novel East, West is significant portrayal of the loss of balance—of harmony—in the lives of two friends.

The story begins with the suicide of Eliot Crane, a schizophrenic writer and friend of the narrator, Kahn.  It is the culmination of two years of sickness in which, in his mad state, he denounces his friends, his wife, everything and everyone but his obsession with what has essentially become his personal demon—his belief in and the pursuit of the occult. 

It is this obsession that is the cause of Eliot’s loss of balance in his mental sphere, his state of mind.  He allows his belief in the fantastic overpower reality, and that is how the madness sets in.  “Eliot was not the hyper-rationalist he claimed to be.  His immersion in the dark arts was more than merely scholarly” (136).  Upon finishing his book on the occult (also called The Harmony of the Spheres), Eliot is visited by what he believes is a supernatural experience.  With this event, he plunges even deeper into the fantastic world of his research, attempting to escape this “demon” by selling his house, unlisting his telephone number, and running away in every other way he can including once driving blindfolded in the wrong direction on the motorway.  Instead of finding relief in his obsession with his occult mythos, it causes him to lose his grip and descend into madness, ending with the taking of his own life.

Kahn’s imbalance is caused not by the occult, but by his romantic relationships and the way he defines himself through them.  Early in the story, he recalls his own crazy windowsill proposal to Laura, a woman he jumped through hoops for in order to win her approval and, he had hoped, her heart.  During an incident where Laura crazily threatens him with a knife, he meets Mala, his future wife.  Just at the point where his identity of being the person Laura wanted to be with was crashing apart in front of him, a moment that could have been the end of his sanity, he is rescued by Mala who becomes the new balance in his life.  When Kahn rediscovers Lucy, a woman with whom he had a childhood romance, he briefly struggles with this balance.  The pair spend two days together on her longboat, away from Eliot who has gone back to Cambridge for an important lecture, and nearly commit an affair together.  However, both Kahn and Lucy morally choose to remain faithful to their respective partners, and thus the balance is restored.  Kahn even admits to himself that this was a flirtation with insanity, as was Eliot’s wrong-way drive.  “Madness.  Love.  I remembered the rose and the tunnel when I heard about Eliot’s high-speed escapade.  Our adventures aboard Bougainvillaea by night and by day had been as dangerous, in their way.  Forbidden embraces and a wrong-way journey in the dark.  But we weren’t shipwrecked, and he wasn’t killed.  Just lucky.  I suppose” (133-134).

Even after Eliot’s death, Kahn is sure that he will not succumb to the breaking with reality that Eliot experienced.  Lucy gives Kahn the task of sorting through tea-chests of Eliot’s writings, which were mostly lunatic rants but also included “Hate-filled, and pornographic [fantasies about us, his friends]” (144).  The most offensive of the ravings appear to be the “pages of steamy sex involving [Kahn’s] wife, Mala” (144) which, with Lucy’s assurance (though she hadn’t read them), Kahn denounces as yet another symptom of poor Eliot’s sickness, something that he himself has managed to avoid. “And I know what made him sick, I thought; and vowed silently to remain well.  Since then there has been no intercourse between the spiritual world and mine” (144).  The great tragedy of the story is when Mala admits to Kahn that these fantasy rendezvous with Eliot were not, as he had assumed, works of fiction or madness.  It is then that Kahn’s “spheres of [his] heart” are finally shattered (146).  The state of his identity as the faithful husband of the faithful couple causes the destruction of his mental stability, balance, and harmony.

Rushdie asks the reader “Why do we lose our minds?” (134).  We are shown that the catalyst of madness or imbalance can differ from person to person.  It can take the form of an unhealthy obsession, the loss of identity, love, lust.  In order to restore that balance, we must attempt to confront our inner demons head-on, as Kahn did, rather than running from them and burrowing deeper into our own fear.