Eliot Crane: Madness and Truth

When I was thirteen, my mom and I went to Oregon to visit her cousin Karen. When we got there, Karen presented me with a present; although it looked as if it had already been quite loved, I took the stuffed pink bunny and hugged it to my chest. I remember very little from that visit, but my mom and I had a conversation about it shortly after: she said to me, “Karen was worried that she might have frightened you.” When I asked why, she explained, “Karen has Paranoid Schizophrenia.” I didn’t understand then the weight of the disorder - it wasn’t until I took an Abnormal Psychology class when I got to college that I was able to delve deeper into the scattered process of a schizophrenic mind and understand Karen’s concern.

Karen was mild compared to Salman Rushdie’s Eliot Crane. In “The Harmony of the Spheres,” a major focus is Eliot Crane’s tension between what is real and what he creates in his head. Told from the perspective of Eliot’s best friend, this short story is an attempt to reason through the deterioration of the human mind. In relaying the events, relationships, and interests that he believes led Eliot to his end, Khan’s voice gives insight to Rushdie’s views on the causes and results of, and solutions to, the concept of madness; further, in rummaging through the remnants of his friend’s fragile thoughts, Khan stumbles upon a possible catalyst for his own trip down the path of destruction.

Eliot’s path was definitely one less traveled by. He was “the author of a scholarly two-volume study of overt and covert occultist groups” (130). In this fact alone are two of what Rushdie appears to consider risk factors: “brilliance,” and what could be referred to as an unhealthy interest in the “dark arts” (136). Combine these circumstances with Eliot’s own belief in “Mesmer’s theory of Animal Magnetism,” the belief that a fluid, “universally diffused,” made a connection “between the heavenly bodies, the earth and all animated bodies” (137), and it is no wonder he went mad; he surrounded himself with intangible words and ideas. He aimed to study things that couldn’t be seen; what belief system can hold up under the strain of lack of evidence?

Instead of restructuring his belief system, Eliot stuck to his guns, literally. In choosing to pursue his theories, Eliot alienated himself from the people and the world around him, making himself more vulnerable to the “ruckus” in his head; “What human mind could have defended itself against such a…“cacodemonic crowd” (142)? Not his. “He…sucked on his shotgun and pulled the trigger” (125): “Bang! And, at last, silence” (142).

Eliot may be free from his demons, but, at Lucy’s request, Khan has taken on the task of looking through her husband’s belongings. As he “plunged through the putrid tea-chests of [his] friend’s mad filth” (144) , Khan was hoping to find a restoration of peace and reason - instead, what he found was the kindling for his own “collapse of harmony” (146), which differs only slightly from Eliot Crane’s. Eliot’s downfall came with his insistence - perhaps out of ignorance - to persist in studies and in ideas which had no outlet. For Khan, his belief this entire journey has been that Eliot was “out of his mind” (137), and that the thoughts in his friend’s “unpublished mind…were only ravings” (143); a belief for which we all believed he had proof. However, when Khan discovers in the last line of the story that these “sorry reams” (143) were not “fantasies” (146), it leaves too much room for him to question what else might be true.

Far more disturbing are the questions Rushdie leaves with us, the readers. We find out that at the same time Khan and Lucy were fighting off the pull of Juhu beach (132), Eliot and Mala were doing far less to fight anything off (145-146). In the tangles of these lustful triangles, what is Rushdie saying about love, marriage, and friendship and the human condition? His hopelessness breaks my heart.