I’ve been watching with some weariness as the machinery of outrage got warmed up over the last several weeks to grind away again at Salman Rushdie in the wake of his recent knighthood. How strange to see all those faded banners dusted off and run up, like tattered sails that might still catch a bit of media wind! The usual fatwas from Tehran, a diplomatic scuffle in Islamabad, mutual expressions of contempt, including, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft observed in a recent letter from London in Slate, “one speaker [who] called our dear queen ???an old crone.’” As strange as this all may seem to Americans, given that the honor awarded Rushdie amounts only to recognition of his fame (no cash), it’s a useful reminder that all literature is political. For example, Wheatcroft notes several theories that have emerged in the British media as to Tony Blair’s motivation in putting forward Rushdie’s name on his final honors list: John Sutherland speculates it was “by way of apology from those who had not supported Rushdie clearly enough in his hour of need 18 years ago.” Others suggest that it reflects the Blair government’s underlying “Islamophobia,” and several “ardent Anglo-neoconservative supporters of the American alliance, the Iraq war, and the crusade against ???Islamofascism’” have voiced their approval of the decision as an affirmation of the principle of freedom of speech (and, one assumes, a timely finger in the eye of those aging mullahs in Tehran). Writers such as Ian McEwan have expressed their satisfaction both at the recognition of Rushdie’s body of work and at the “firm message,” it sends “to the book-burners and their appeasers.” (Because, we may presume, book burners listen with rapt attention to what a British monarch has to say on the subject, given that British monarchs gave up their own taste for burning heretics some years ago.) A story in yesterday’s The New York Times even speculated that the failed terror attacks in Great Britain over the last few days might represent a Jihadist response to the Rushdie knighthood.
But what really caught my interest were Wheatcroft’s observations about the reluctance with which some British conservatives have come to Rushdie’s defense. Here, he cites Ruth Dudley Edwards’ “prevailing thoughts” about Rushdie in Tuesday’s Daily Mail (“Self-important, pretentious, attention-seeking and ungrateful”) and the locus classicus of Tory Rushdiephobia, Norman Tebbit’s description in 1989 of the author as “an outstanding villain” and a man whose “public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality. Now he betrays even his own sneers at the British establishment.” I find this comment particularly illuminating for what it suggests about the expectations some conservatives hold for literature and those who write it: in Tebbit’s terms, the writer’s task is to affirm the values of his or her upbringing, religion, and nation (adopted or not). To “betray” those values is to become “an outstanding villain.” (Or perhaps it’s simply to become a villain, and Rushdie’s knighthood is in recognition for his having done it so very well.)
It’s always been my feeling that the most important literature is that which challenges those “home truths,” and in so doing forces us to step outside the ideology of a particular cultural moment to see what lies beyond those self-imposed boundaries of belief and literary form that the theorist Hans Robert Jauss has termed our “horizon of expectation.” It’s hard to imagine a writer who has done that more successfully than Rushdie, particularly in a novel like The Satanic Verses, which recasts the opening scene of Milton’s Paradise Lost ??? that beautiful line about Satan “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” ??? with his illegal immigrant angel, Gibreel, and “buttony, pursed” devil, Saladin Chamcha, an East-Englishman whose soul is a monstrous hybrid of Indian memory and English aspirations, as shattered by its conflicting desires as the airplane from which he tumbles to earth after a terrorist bombing. Love this book or hate it, it’s hard not to think of it as the novel of our time, and its strange, sprawling narrative — “illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic” –is exactly the point: how does one end up turning into what we fear most? Well, that turns out to be the central irony of this age of terror, as America is now learning to our shame. Virtually all recent accounts of the Rushdie affair contain a note of impatience about the book at the center of the controversy: important, yes, but do we really have to read it? I can’t help thinking of the Irish reaction to Ulysses throughout most of the last century, or the American response to Lolita. Such books cause us deep anxiety until we can tame them by turning them into something safe: a tourist attraction, a search term for internet porn, or a line in the sand that Western governments can draw to affirm the value of free speech, even as they turn quietly into regimes of black prisons, Orwellian newspeak, and the “man-sized safes” in which Vice President Cheney satisfies his secrecy fetish. But like Ulysses or Lolita, The Satanic Verses remains a novel — complex, contradictory, often frustrating, but always a creation of an individual imagination as it struggles to free itself from the prison of ideology. And so to read it is a political act: in doing so we resist all attempts to defuse the power of this dangerous book by turning it into nothing more than a weapon in the ongoing wars between those — in both East and West — who would silence the imagination.