A web of errors

I've just read a scholarly essay identifying the author of the Oz books as Frank Zappa, a silly error that ought to have been caught by a good fact-checker--but don't even get me started on the sorry state of fact-checking and line-editing in academic publishing today.

The Zappa error made me smile but I'm more annoyed by a web of errors in what ought to be a reputable work: The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. In an otherwise unexceptional essay called "Salman Rushdie and the English Tradition," Peter Morey compares Rushdie's Shame to A Tale of Two Cities, noting the similarity between Rani Harappa's embroidery and Madame DeFarge's knitting. So far so good, but then he slips up by asserting that Madame DeFarge "claims to be knitting 'shrouds,' like the burqas stitched by Rani Harappa in which her husband eventually flees."

Nope. Rani stitches no burqas and her husband never manages to flee his prison cell--unless you consider his violent death a metaphorical flight. Bilquis Hyder is the one who weaves burqas in which her husband flees.

But that minor error is nothing--nothing!--compared to this more egregious example perpetrated by Abdulrazak Gurnah in the book's introduction:

"The three sisters rebel against their incarceration by going to a dance in the British 'lines' and returning with a joint pregnancy, whose outcome is Omar Khayyam Shakil, whose self-indulgence knows no shame. Rani Harrapa, Iskander Harrapa's wife, knits a shawl in which she records her husband's murders."

1. The three sisters do not go to a dance but host the party at their own house.

2. "Harrapa" is spelled wrong. Try Harappa.

3. Knits a shawl? There is no knitting. Rani embroiders.

4. One shawl? Try 18.

5. Rani records not just her husband's murders but his debaucheries, profanities, deceptions, and other evil acts.

It wouldn't matter so much except that the sentence describing Rani's embroidery is among the more remarkable passages ever written, weaving a host of voices into one highly embroidered sentence covering five pages of text. No one who has been swept away by that sentence could possibly err as Gurnah does, which makes me question the extent of his engagement with the text.

But these errors also echo the problem I face every time I teach Susan Glaspell's play "Trifles." In order to fully understand the act of deception practiced by the women at the end, readers must understand exactly what it means to "quilt it" or "knot it," knowledge that the vast majority of my students lack. Likewise, Rushdie's readers who lack an understanding of various types of needlework may consider embroidery, knitting, and weaving as pretty much the same thing.

But they're not the same, and sometimes the difference matters. A simple typo can be forgiven, even if it transforms L. Frank Baum into Frank Zappa, but this systematic ignorance of traditional needle arts serves to further marginalize women's work and women's voices.