The Fine Line

Being a genius or being stark raving mad? There is always a fine line between those. However, we can always see people walking on the line but they end up losing the battle. Inside of our mind, there are some different kinds of demons that can affect us. Unless we can overcome them, we will never win the battle. In Salman Rushdie’s novel East, West, there is a story named “The Harmony of the Spheres”. A genius writer named Eliot Crane walks the line and loses it. The author, Rushdie, tries to find out the reasons of his demise by exploring these ravings of a madman/genius.

Eliot Crane was working on a book at the moment of his suicide. Khan, one of his friends, remembers him and says, “…probably make something half-way decent of his life, if he doesn’t kill himself first.” (Rushdie P.145) Everyone knew that Eliot Crane would have a good future, but the problem was he could not escape from the demons inside himself. When he lived, he had some weird behaviors. He suspected that his wife spied on him by putting microphones in the butter and drove out to show his friends where he would like to be buried after he died. Eliot himself had explained that why he was “sick”. He said that he was sick because he had “a simple biochemical imbalance.” (Rushdie P.134) Actually, the title “The Harmony of the Spheres” tells a lot about the story. I believe that Eliot’s imbalance causes disharmony so that it leads to his demise.

Khan, Eliot’s friend, finds out that Eliot had had an affair with his wife before he died. He feels that “an explosion in his chest with an unbearable raucous crack” (Rushdie P.146) Therefore, he feels like collapsing of harmony. His harmony just collapses like Eliot did and Rushdie does not offer any solutions to this kind of madness. Eliot and Khan are both walking on the fine line. Paranoid schizophrenia is a disease that can affect people’s life. Rushdie uses the story to tell people how horrible of this disease is. Also, he displays this catastrophic event in the destruction of a genius in Eliot as a shadow of everyday society.