Salman Rushdie

Andrew Teverson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

In this comprehensive and lucid critical study, Andrew Teverson examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure.

PART I

Contexts and intertexts

1

Introduction

For every text, a context. (Salman Rushdie, 1984, IHL, 92)

It is not hard to establish Salman Rushdie’s fame: his novels have sold in their millions and been translated into multiple languages; the MLA international bibliography lists over seven hundred journal articles and book chapters written about his fiction; and there are currently in excess of thirty published monographs on various aspects of his life and work. Rushdie himself makes regular appearances at major international conferences and literary events, he gives frequent interviews and lectures, he is the subject of a number of documentaries and has appeared in films – both as a performer (a comical cameo in Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001) and as a character (a cartoon villain in the propaganda piece International Guerrillas).¹ His works have also enjoyed an extended life in other media: stage shows and musicals have been made based upon his novels, Bono from U2 has written a song using lyrics from The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), and a film based on one of his short stories entitled The Firebird’s Nest is planned by the director Apoorva Lakhia. Perhaps most revealingly, the name of Salman Rushdie has become so familiar internationally that even those who do not generally read literary fiction have heard of him and know something about the subjects concerning which he writes.

Whilst Rushdie’s prominence as a writer is everywhere apparent, however, it is harder to establish what it is precisely that he is famous for – his writings, or the 1989 fatwa in which the Ayatollah Khomeini demanded his execution for blasphemy. It is almost certainly the case that, had the threat to Rushdie’s life not made him headline news in the late 1980s, 746,949 copies of The Satanic Verses (1988) would not have sold in 1989, and tabloid newspapers would not now make Rushdie’s complicated love life the subject of double-page ‘exclusives’. As Rushdie is quick to point out, however, he was already a well-known writer long before the passage of the Ayatollah’s headline-grabbing decree, albeit for different and somewhat quieter (though not always uncontentious) reasons. By 1989 Rushdie had published three novels, the latter two of which, Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983), had been widely applauded by the literary world. Rushdie had also, already, been the revered object of some of the media’s most superlative praise, gleaning journalistic sound-bites for himself that may still be seen gracing the covers of his novels. In both the countries that Rushdie claimed as home in the early 1980s, moreover, Midnight’s Children had, long before the fatwa, been greeted not only as a work of startling originality but as one that was destined to become a landmark text in the emergent counter-canon of ‘post-colonial’ (then ‘commonwealth’) fiction. In Delhi Anita Desai, upon attending a reading of Rushdie’s fiction, remembers thinking that she was listening to ‘the voice of a new age’.² Likewise, in London, the award of the Booker Prize to Midnight’s Children in 1981 led Rushdie’s near contemporary Kazuo Ishiguro, later a winner of the Booker Prize himself for The Remains of the Day (1989), to conclude that the publication of this novel represented ‘a real symbolic moment’, a ‘milestone’ for English-language authors living in Britain whose origins were not British. ‘It so happened that around this time I brought out A Pale View of Hills’, Ishiguro recalls. ‘Usually first novels disappear … without a trace. Yet I received a lot of attention, got lots of coverage, and did a lot of interviews.’ The reason: ‘everyone was suddenly looking for other Rushdies’.³

A novel that had such an impact on the literary world, it is safe to assume, would have ensured, fatwa or no fatwa, that its author remained studied in universities, negotiated by other writers, read by readers across the globe, courted by publishers, and nominated for major literary prizes. It is even arguable that the fatwa has actually served to damage Rushdie’s reputation as a writer. In the first place, it has had the effect of turning Rushdie, in the public imagination, into a writer who writes exclusively and bombastically about Islam, when in fact Rushdie’s interest in religion is only one aspect of a much more complex body of writing that engages with subject areas as diverse as the role of the occult in the countercultures of 1960s London, institutionalised racism in the police force in Thatcherite Britain, the conquest of Moorish Spain by Queen Isabella in the fifteenth century, Christian fundamentalism in contemporary America, Hindu fundamentalism in contemporary Mumbai, the Indian visual arts, European avant-garde cinema, the global phenomena of popular music and the impact on culture of the World Wide Web (to cite a few examples).

In the second place, the fatwa may be seen to have damaged Rushdie’s reputation as a writer to the extent that the ‘seriousness’ of the ‘Rushdie Affair’, the gravity of the issues that it raised, has tended to create a general perception of his fiction that is more likely to have prevented readers discovering and appreciating his work than to have attracted them to it. Rush-die’s fiction, it is sometimes felt by those approaching it for the first time, is going to be ‘heavy’, obsessed with theological detail and hampered by political argumentativeness. Readers with such expectations, however, are invariably surprised to discover that he is a comic writer, capable of approaching political and religious issues with levity, irreverence and humour. Indeed, it was Rushdie’s habit of treating sacred subject matters with irreverence that angered some Islamic groups in the first instance.

To defend Rushdie against the accusation that he benefited from the fatwa is not, however, to imply that different and more pertinent questions cannot be raised about the social and political motives for his fiction being valorised in the ways that it has been. The fatwa may be discounted as the principal motivation for what Aijaz Ahmad has called the ‘exorbitant celebration of Salman Rushdie’, but harder to discount are arguments that his fiction has been so widely feted because his books satisfy a Western commercial appetite for the ‘exotic’.⁴ This aspect of the reception of Rushdie’s works is not lost on Ishiguro who, even as he expresses gratitude that the success of Rushdie’s second novel helped bring his own fictions into the limelight, is aware that the enthusiastic welcome accorded to works like Midnight’s Children is not purely aesthetic in character. After the award of the Booker Prize to Midnight’s Children, Ishiguro notes with a hint of disapproval, ‘It was one of the few times in the recent history of British arts in which it was an actual plus to have a funny foreign name and to be writing about funny foreign places’.⁵ In an early, assassin’s essay on Midnight’s Children, the Indian critic Aparna Mahanta reformulates this criticism in more extreme terms, arguing that Rushdie’s novel did well in Britain because it was the latest in a long line of fictions to pander to Western desires to see India as a strange, sensual, tyrannical, fantastical other-place. ‘In the lack-lustre world of postwar British fiction, Salman Rushdie’s exotic fantasies have made a deep impact,’ she writes; but not because ‘exotic fantasia is alien to the tradition of British fiction’; rather because ‘it has a very respectable lineage going back to Swift and Sterne and coming down to Waugh and Greene, a patrimony which … Rushdie has been able to emulate very successfully’. ‘Naturally with the passing of the empire, this strain has waned,’ she goes on, but ‘Rushdie now steps into the gap, coming in the wake of the reigning nostalgia for the Raj, and decked with all the trappings of wit, humour and satire, that were the hallmarks of British fiction in the grand old days’. Rushdie’s fiction, so far as Mahanta is concerned, effectively demonstrates that ‘the Raj isn’t dead after all’, but lives on in ‘The pseudo-sons, the Saleem Sinais’ who have taken over from the heroes of Rudyard Kipling and of E. M. Forster.⁶

Ironically, Rushdie himself, in the same year that Mahanta penned this article, was engaged in a fierce critique of the popularity of what he calls ‘Raj revivalist’ fictions and films in the United Kingdom. These fictions, Rushdie argues (which include Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi and the television serialisations of The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown), are engaged in ‘the creation of a false orient’ which – like mulligatawny soup – ‘tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra-parochially British, only with too much pepper’ (IHL, 88–90). Such fictions are, Rushdie argues, politically suspect for a number of reasons: they revive the stereotypes of India inherited from the Orientalist tradition, they make Indians ‘bit-players in their own history’, and they imply that the British, rather than the Indians, are ‘the ones whose stories matter’ (IHL, 90). Primarily, however, Rushdie insists that these fictions ‘must be quarrelled with, as loudly and embarrassingly as possible’ because they pedal ‘a number of [false] notions about history’, notably:

the view … that the British and Indians actually understood each other jolly well … that the end of Empire was a sort of gentleman’s agreement between old pals at the club … and, above all, the fantasy that the British Empire represented something ‘noble’ or ‘great’ about Britain; that it was, in spite of all its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous. (IHL, 101)

Evidently, so far as Rushdie is concerned, his own Midnight’s Children represents, not an effect of this ‘Raj revival’ but an antidote to it: a fiction that depicts India from an Indian point of view, that places Indians centre stage, and that is overtly hostile to, rather than celebratory of, British imperial activities within India. Critics like Mahanta, however, seek to question the very basis for this defence, firstly by suggesting that Midnight’s Children was successful in the West not because it resisted the ‘Raj revival’ but because it coincided with it, and secondly by denying that Midnight’s Children can be described as a novel that is written from or represents the Indian point of view. As Mahanta goes on to argue in her article, Midnight’s Children, as a novel written in English that draws substantially on European literary forms, cannot be said to be pitched at ordinary Indians, but only at Westerners and at:

a tiny stratum of India’s and Pakistan’s elite, inheritors of the British mantle, the deracinated, speaking English, thinking English, dreaming English, Indians terrified, horrified, revolted by Indians and India, yet unable to escape the umbilical bonds.⁷

Mahanta’s argument here is a touch overstated, particularly in its sensationalist contention, repeated twice in the article, that Rushdie is ‘revolted by Indians’. She does, however, identify a ‘problem’ with Rushdie’s socio-cultural location that subsequent critics have also foregrounded. Timothy Brennan, for instance, in the first published monograph on Rushdie’s fiction, argues that Rushdie cannot be said to speak from the perspective of, or on the behalf of, the generality of ‘Third World’ citizens because his fiction is addressed primarily to a metropolitan intellectual elite. Likewise Aijaz Ahmad and M. Keith Booker (in his later work at least) have argued that Rushdie has been globally successful as a novelist because his privileged class location and his preference for sophisticated modernist and postmodernist narrative forms ensures that his work conforms to the kinds of discourses authorised by the Anglo-American academy.⁸ Whilst the formula of Rushdie’s fictions has ensured that he has been extremely well received in the Western (and Westernised) world, such critics contend, it is not a formula that is politically enabling for the non-West because it is not, as Brennan puts it, ‘addressed to them’.⁹

It is one of the aims of this book to examine the intellectual basis of Rushdie’s politicised aesthetic in detail and, in so doing, to explore such criticisms further. It is worth noting from the outset, however, that one of the characteristic features of Salman Rushdie’s writing is its self-consciousness, and its willingness to incorporate an analysis of the cultural locations from which it is written. The result of this is that the criticisms that can be (and have been) made of Rushdie as a writer are frequently anticipated, if not entirely defused or ‘answered’, in his own writing – a fact that makes any simplistic judgements about his political locations difficult. Rushdie occupies, as already suggested, a privileged position as a migrant intellectual, commenting, in a number of his works, upon political situations that are viewed from a geographical (and we might add emotional and ideo logical) distance. But he also foregrounds the fact that he is writing from this perspective, and sets out, in his fiction, to explore the implications of this location. Rushdie, in this sense, does not claim to speak from the perspective of ‘Indians’ – a diverse body in itself, as Rushdie frequently points out, that it would be impossible to speak about from any singular perspective anyway. Rather, he claims to speak from the perspective of the privileged migrant Indian intellectual in a complex, even compromised, but not entirely unworkable position. This is a position that, by his own admission, has its drawbacks – it means that he writes as an ‘outsider’ from several cultures and an ‘insider’ of none, and it means that his writing emerges out of an experience of disjuncture and discontinuity. It has always been Rushdie’s insistence, however, that this position may also have advantages, and that it is on the basis of these advantages that the value of his fiction should be judged.

The capacity of Rushdie’s fiction to foreground the ambivalences of its own cultural location – his refusal, in his own terms, to simplify that which is not simple – may, for some readers, prove irritating or, even, ideologically disabling. As Aijaz Ahmad argues, ‘There is a quality of linguistic quicksand’ in his writing that makes it seem as if he is ‘forever … taking back with one hand what he has given with the other’.¹⁰ Tabish Khair argues in a similar vein that Rushdie’s ‘self-criticism’ is a ‘defensive manoeuvre’ that ‘seeks to pre-empt criticism without providing enough (let alone independent) space for the narration of the other whose criticism is being pre-empted’.¹¹ Other readers however find Rushdie’s willingness to steal a march on potential critics by a ‘rigorous questioning [his] own assumptions, of the ground that [he stands] on’, refreshing and accurately reflective of the need for all statements to position themselves.¹² Graham Huggan, for instance, has argued that it is Rushdie’s capacity to ‘stage’ his ‘marginality’ knowingly for a mainstream audience whilst simultaneously mounting a critique of ‘the dominant culture’s need for subaltern others’ that constitutes the principal political force of his writing.¹³ ‘One of the ironies of [Rushdie’s] career to date’, in Huggan’s estimation, ‘is that it has been built on opposing, while also perpetuating, the commodified exoticisms that are endemic to [the] East–West literary encounter’.¹⁴

Whether the reader finds Rushdie’s political location evasive or enabling, it is clear that his fiction – because of his complex cultural position and because of the readiness with which he analyses that position – intersects with many of the most pressing debates in contemporary cultural and political affairs, including issues of migrancy, cultural and religious affiliation, the values of political action and the nature of political writing in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. It is with debates such as this that the current book is primarily concerned.

2

Political and intellectual contexts

In a journalistic reflection on the Granta Magazine selection of the ‘Best of the Young British Novelists’ for 1993, Salman Rushdie rejects the idea, temporarily mooted in the early 1990s, that the years of Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90) had produced a ‘lost generation’ of writers. Such a notion, Rushdie suggests, is disproved by the most cursory survey of a literary scene that includes such budding luminaries as Louis de Bernières, Tibor Fischer, Lawrence Norfolk and A. L. Kennedy. Nevertheless,, Rushdie goes on to imply, there remains an element of truth in the common supposition that the dominance of Thatcherism throughout the 1980s had a si...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Part I Contexts and intertexts
• Part II Novels and criticism
• Afterword: Shalimar the Clown
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index