Source of book: Borrowed from the library.
While I utilize the drop boxes for our local libraries most of the time, I do try to return audiobooks over the counter (which is what they prefer.) The problem with this is that, once one is already inside the library, the temptation to check the new and featured book display is entirely irresistible. Which means I tend to bring home books that I didn’t expect, making my night stand pile increasingly precarious.
The upside to this is that our local librarians have a knack for picking great books to feature, and I have discovered a number of excellent reads that I had no idea existed.
This book is one of them. It is a new book, by an author that I love, but haven’t read nearly enough of, to be honest.
Salman Rushdie first came in 1988 - I was age 12 - when Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses caused a huge kerfuffle over in Iran when the theofascist clerics running the country decided the book was blasphemous. As theofascists do, they issued a “fatwa” condemning him to death, and even sent armed thugs over to Great Britain to try and carry out the sentence. Fortunately, the assassination attempts were unsuccessful, and Rushdie was eventually placed under police protection. Unfortunately, Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated the book into Japanese, was murdered in Japan, probably by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, although the murder is officially “unsolved.” This was the era of aircraft hijackings and bombings, and before the US shifted from Iran to Iraq and Afghanistan as its official enemies. The geopolitics are complicated and beyond the scope of this post (but you can read my review of A Peace to End All Peace for part of the picture. And also, Rushdie understood that fundamentalism in Iran was the direct result of US support for the Shah - and the CIA-led coup that ended democracy in that country.) In any event, Rushdie became one of the prime targets of religious persecution as a result of the book.
Fast forward about 20 years, and I was in my 30s, and going through a dry spell in my reading (in part because of lots of very small children.) My wife was concerned, and encouraged me to take up reading again. To this end, she brought home a copy of The Satanic Verses from the library for me to read, and I was soon hooked. It is a brilliant book, my first major experience with Magical Realism, and led soon after to my deciding to set aside time nearly every evening to read. Eventually, I started this blog to talk about my reading.
The thing is, The Satanic Verses is also a prime example of how Fundamentalist bigots function. After reading the book, I was genuinely puzzled at how it became such a firestorm. (Rushdie was shocked too, and, as he notes in one of the essays in this book, puzzled that the obviously ludicrous interpretations put on the book seemed to win out over the reasonable ones.) The “offending” issue was that the book (in what is essentially a quasi-historical dream sequence) looks at a verse in the Koran that is controversial because it refers positively to a trio of pre-Muslim goddesses. A pair of early Muslim historians discussed the passage, giving rise to a theory that Mohammed was deceived by Satan into putting the verses in. So, seriously arcane internal theological discussion about infallibility of the prophet and so on. I suspect that in 1988, the number of non-Muslims who had any knowledge of this whatsoever was exceedingly small. And it wasn’t as if this was something that Rushdie made up to insult Islam. He just repurposed a historical-theological incident in service of his plot. Of course, there is also the possibility that the REAL issue wasn’t, as the mullahs claimed, this passage, but rather one in which he describes a fanatical modern religious leader who seems a bit too much like Ayatollah Khomeini. Just saying. In any case, I think it would be safe to say that almost nobody who got their panties in a knot over the book actually read it, let alone understood what the book was about. Which is…exactly how Fundamentalist bigots always act when it comes to art that they want to protest.
Okay, that got a bit off point, but it helps to inform as to where Rushdie is coming from in some of his essays. Nothing like having a price on your head to make you a bit pissy about fundamentalist religion. And Rushdie is. But Rushdie is also perceptive about the nature of Fundamentalism, which is why I have used the following quote regularly:
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion; it is about power.
So, what is this book about? Just published last year, it is a collection of essays and other non-fiction writings by Rushdie, dated from 2003 to 2020. These vary a lot in topic and genre and length, but are uniformly fascinating and thoughtful. The book divides them into four parts, which are not labeled, but seem to fall into natural groupings.
The first part is four longer essays about writing and fiction, imagination and metaphor, realism versus fantasy. These essays are, alone, worth the price of the book. Absolutely fantastic. Rushdie tells a bit about his own childhood and later life throughout, tying these in with his own books, as well as a surprisingly wide range of other literature, ancient and contemporary. (He clearly continues to read newly published books, particularly by non-white and female authors, which is probably one reason that his thoughts seem so fresh.) I’ll give a few quotes to give the flavor, but they really need to be read in their entirety for full appreciation. First is from “Wonder Tales,” which is a passionate defense of magical elements in stories.
I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. As adults, falling in love less easily, we may end up with only a handful of books that we can truly say we love. Maybe this is why we make so many bad judgments.
The whole essay is amazing, but that gives at least a bit of where he is coming from. I can also truthfully say that I have been profoundly affected by the books I read as a child, including a number that my parents encouraged me to read but now seem to contradict their increasingly hard-right political beliefs.
The next one, “Proteus,” ties together Shakespeare, Edward Bond, Kafka, Howard Brenton, the ancient Indian myths, and, of course, Proteus. And makes it work. There is so much more to it than a handful of quotes, but I found no fewer than four that I had to mention.
Now, the fictionality of fiction is an important matter; it lies at the heart of the transaction, the contract, between the work and its audience, the work confessing its untruth while promising to uncover truth, the audience suspending its disbelief in what it knows is not to be believed and so discovering material that is worth believing in.
It is too long to quote all of it, but Rushdie makes the point that “reality isn’t realistic;” that is, it is too fantastic and overblown and monstrous to be believable. Even the insides of any given family are too crazy for fiction. (And he’s right.) The summary is short enough to quote, though.
So this is what I like to argue when I’m sitting in an open shirt in a tavern, spilling ale: I like to argue that reality isn’t realistic, and so I prefer this other kind of literature, what one might call the protean tradition, which is more realistic than realism, because it corresponds to the unrealism of the world.
And how about this insight?
So inside any given “reality,” a given picture of the world, there will be a number of nailed-down facts -- the name of the president, the age of your spouse, the place occupied by your favorite sports teams in the weekly standings -- but there will also, often, be nailed-down fictions -- common prejudices, ignorances, mistakes, and items of state propaganda (which comes these days in a range of attractive colors) -- masquerading as facts.
Rushdie also notes that he can have a pleasant discussion about the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome, because nobody takes them literally. Which is one reason he prefers them. And also because they seem more, well, human.
The gods were unlike fictional characters in their heyday, in the days when people actually believed in them, the days when the Greek myths were the Greek religion and the Roman myths were the Roman religion and you could have terrible things done to you for speaking the way I’m speaking now, because what is now a pleasant literary discussion would then have been the sin of blasphemy. One could wish that one or two of the current crop of monotheisms would decay to the point at which what is now considered blasphemy might turn into a pleasant literary discussion, but no such luck, or not yet.
Hey, I am a believer in one of those monotheisms, and I endorse this. Literalist, Fundamentalist religion is just a power trip by sociopaths, as our current politics amply demonstrate, both in the Middle East and here in the United States. It makes me sad to think that maybe Rushdie is right, that the beauty in Christianity will only be discovered when nobody believes it anymore, and until then, we are stuck with the hate and violence.
Next up is “Hereclitus,” which actually starts off with Peanuts and goes pretty far afield by the end. Which is a fun ride. I wanted to note two things, though. First is that Heraclitus himself (at least in the fragments that have survived) seems to have originated the idea of the logos adopted by Saint John in the opening of his gospel. Second is that Rushdie’s description of him as “something of a mixed bag, part wise man, part fortune cookie” is hilarious. And a bit more true than not.
The final essay in this section is an expanded version of a lecture he gave in 2016 for a series related to Eudora Welty. In it, he talks mostly about his beginnings - it is a tribute to her own essay, “One Writer’s Beginnings” - but he also quotes from his interview with her years ago. And damn, she was a wicked wit. Here is how it went:
I couldn’t think of a proper question, and so, in a sort of blurt, I uttered the words: “William Faulkner!”
She turned and looked at me benevolently. “Yes, dear,” she said. “What about him?”
What about him indeed, I thought, panicking a little. “On the whole,” I ended up asking, “would you say that he has been a help or a hindrance to you?”
“Well, dear, neither one,” she replied. “It’s like having a big mountain in the neighborhood. It’s very nice to know it’s there, but it doesn’t help you do your work.”
This was a fine reply, but I dared to ask one question more. “So do you not think of Faulkner as one of the writers who are closest to you?”
“Oh, no, dear,” she replied, affecting shock. “I’m from Jackson. He’s from Oxford. It’s miles away.”
The second section is about specific authors. Some of these are book introductions, some essays or reviews, but they are all about authors that mean something to Rushdie. Some are about old books (Don Quixote) while others are modern. The section ends with an essay that I think belongs more properly to the third section, entitled “Very Well Then, I Contradict Myself,” which was excellent, but I didn’t note any specific quotes from it. While I enjoyed all of the essays in this section, I will confess that the ones about authors I have read had richer meaning than for authors I have merely heard of. (For example, haven’t read any Harold Pinter or Philip Roth.) Also, not all of these essays are about just one author - some are more about ideas that draw in multiple authors. It’s a varied selection. First up is from the excellent essay on Kurt Vonnegut, but is ironically a quote by another author, Julian Barnes, which Rushdie cites in relation to those who misunderstand “so it goes” as an acceptance of evil.
“The definition of irony is what people miss.”
There is a passage in the essay on Samuel Beckett’s novels (which are less known than his plays) that I loved as well.
When I was a college student, browsing in bookstores was meat and drink to me. I never studied English literature, but, loving books, plunged into libraries and bookshops like a starving man, gobbling whatever came to hand. I went on long idiosyncratic reading jags, experimenting with literature's mind-altering effects at a time when many of my contemporaries were fumbling with other, less verbal keys to perception’s doors.
Yes, that was me too. I spent a lot of my teens reading stuff. And, as this blog is evidence, I have spent a lot of my 30s and 40s doing the same. And I too have not had a college course on English literature, but, even if my experience is nowhere near that of Rushdie (who seems to have read voraciously all his life), I have a better working knowledge of the classics than many college graduates I know.
Right now, for our book club, we are reading 100 Years of Solitude, so it was fun to read the essay on Gabriel Garcia Marquez at the same time. It is a fascinating book, if very strange - stay tuned for a review. Anyway, here is an interesting take, from a man who grew up in a very different world than I did.
Reading the works of Garcia Marquez and the other writers I discovered at Compendium Books, I found myself thinking, in response to almost every page, how much of their worlds I recognized from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places, Latin America and South Asia, there was and still is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with powerful colonial histories -- different colonialists, same results -- and in both places religion is of great importance, and God is alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly.
From the stories my parents (both missionary kids to colonized nations) told me, this seems accurate. And, as Rushdie points out elsewhere in the book, the legacy of colonialism doesn’t just go away -- it lingers for centuries in the form of institutions and languages and beliefs. And that line about the real issue when “God is alive” is proving to be all too true as well. True believers seem rather unwilling to spread the love of God, and eager instead to do violence in his name.
I haven’t read any Harold Pinter, but the essay about him - essentially an obituary - was a good read. It also sounds like Pinter was quite the character. Rushdie relates a story where Pinter was acting in one of his own plays, and the director asked him a question about a confusing passage and how he intended it should be played. Pinter responded with “The author’s intentions are not clear from the text.” Rushdie asked him about that later, and Pinter confirmed that he had indeed said that. When asked why he didn’t just answer the question, Pinter said, “I wrote that play almost twenty-five [expletive deleted] years ago. How the [expletive deleted] would I know?”
Appended to the obituary is an excerpt from an acceptance speech that Rushdie gave when he received an award. It mentions Pinter and the refusal to “explain” what a work meant, in connection with Rushdie’s experience with The Satanic Verses. At first, Rushdie naively assumed that the Fundie “interpretations” of his work would be recognized as stupid, and fade away. But they haven’t. And he still has no satisfying answer as to how to face down Fundamentalists and their violence. I think his description of Fundamentalist religion in this passage explains why I myself have broken from organized religion altogether, after seeing how it works in practice here in the US: “Religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god.”
One of my favorite essays in this section - indeed the entire book - is “Autobiography and the Novel.” As Rushdie points out, there is a modern tendency to assume that novels are autobiographical, which is problematic to say the least. Sure, authors always do draw something from their own experiences, but fiction is not autobiography. This assumption that the author and the character are the same is particularly ludicrous. As Rushdie puts it, “The imagination, in our imaginative times, is no more than a costume that the facts put on.” His response to this is deliciously snarky.
“How autobiographical is it?” As it happens, there is a right and a wrong answer to this question. The wrong answer first: “It’s not really autobiographical. I suppose there are bits of me in there, bits of things that really happened, but they’ve all been changed around and jumbled up with other things that I just made up, and there are bits of people I know, but they are all mixed up with other bits I invented. You know, it’s fiction?” This answer has the merit of usually being true, but it is still the wrong answer. The right answer is: “It’s completely autobiographical. Yes! Everything in this novel happened either to me or to close friends or family members!” Only this answer will satisfy, and even impress, the person asking the question. Only this answer will allow you to move past the autobiography question to other, arguably more interesting questions about the work itself.
On the other hand, Rushdie notes that there are parts of an author that do make it into every work of fiction, and that is his experiences and the culture he grew up in or lives in. He himself is an atheist, but in writing about India and Pakistan, he has to write about religious people, or it wouldn’t be true in any meaningful sense. Particularly in India, where the number of gods is about one for every four humans. And this affects his understanding of what “realism” means in that context. I do love his deadpan about the number of gods.
And it’s even stranger than that, because while the divine population is presumably reasonably stable -- one assumes divine birth control to be better than the human variety -- the human population has been growing at high speed; in fact it has more than doubled since I was at school in Bombay in the 1950s. So if we project that population curve backward, we see that it was probably only sometime in the 1930s that the human population of India grew larger than the divine population for the first time.
I wanted to mention a few bits from “Adaptation,” which starts out about the adaptation of books to films. He is pretty balanced about this, although he does some pretty hard takedowns of bad adaptations.
Everyone accepts that stories and films are different things and that the source material must be modified, even radically modified, to be effective in the new medium. The only interesting questions are “how?” and “how much?” However, when the original is virtually discarded, it’s difficult to know if the result can be called an adaptation at all.
For Rushdie, of course, this isn’t just academic. He is a writer who has had his books adapted for film. So he had to ask himself “what is essential?” And then he goes on to apply this to live in general. I love his thoughts on this.
As individuals, as communities, we are the constant adapters of ourselves and must constantly ask ourselves the question. Wherein does our finch-ness lie, so to speak: Of what does our essence consist; what are the things we cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves? We move to a new city, a new country; we find ourselves among people we do not know, who do not know us. Perhaps we do not speak their language perfectly, nor they ours. Perhaps their customs, their belief systems, are different from ours. Our children will grow up in these new streets, among these new people, speaking this new tongue. Should we too adapt to the new ways, so that our children do not find us strange? Or should we hold fast to the old ways, so that we can pass them on down the generations? If we are religious among non-religionists, should we accommodate our thinking to theirs so that we can live easily among them, or harden our own, even if it means we are forever thought of as outsiders? If we are radicals among conservatives, should we tone down our ideas? You see that the question of adaptation is at bottom the oldest of questions: Who are we, and how shall we live? The matter of essences is also, in the end, an ethical question -- it raises, inevitably, the ancient argument between right action and wrong.
Interesting questions. And one that my former tribe has struggled with in an era of cultural and demographic change. Alas, the answer seems to have been (1) “Our ‘essence’ is whiteness, and (2) We can and should brutalize those who are different.
One of the more unusual essays was “Notes on Sloth: From Saligia to Oblomov.” With discussions of Hamlet and Bartleby, of course, and also the seven deadly sins. I can’t even begin to describe the ideas in this essay, but they are unexpected and thought provoking. One like did stand out, however, from his mention of De Quincey. Who, in his book on opium use, said some disgusting things about India and its people. Rushdie can’t really get over it, and I can’t blame him. And he absolutely nails it with this line:
There are worse sins than the deadly ones. Bigotry is high on that list.
Some of the essays are on truly unexpected topics. One of these is his introduction to David Remmick’s biography of Muhammad Ali. Which gets into a lot of the political stuff that caused plenty of white people of my parents’ generation to loathe Ali. Which says a lot more about them than Ali himself. Because Ali was right about Vietnam, and stood up to the government that wanted him to “go and kill the yellow man,” as Springsteen put it. If only more had done so, we might have avoided a senseless and futile war. Rushdie’s take on the 1960s in this essay is excellent.
“The sixties” were full of foolishness. The drugs were stupid and the Hare Krishna wisdom-of-the-East nonsense was stupid and the Vietnam War was the most stupid thing of all. But in among all the stupidity was courage that changed the world, feminist courage, the courage of the civil rights movement, and the courage of Muhammad Ali, and so the lesson we learned from “the sixties,” if we weren’t too stoned to learn it, was that it was possible, by one’s own personal, direct actions, to bend the universe to your will and remake society, improve it, give it better music, higher ideals, and freedom.
Sadly, as Richard Hofstadter and Kristin Cobes du Mez chronicled, the Religious Right (my former tribe) took exactly the wrong lessons from the sixties, deciding that we lost Vietnam not because we were interfering in a civil war that ousted the colonialists but because we didn’t bomb the shit out of the Vietnamese even more than we did. And also decided that all that “black” music was of the devil and that the goal of religion should be to restore segregation, and that political action should be to fight positive change.
The third section of the book is all about freedom of speech, the nature of truth, and other philosophical topics. I should mention that “Truth” and “Courage” are both excellent, even if I didn’t write down any quotes. There are five essays that are connected to PEN, the organization that advocates for freedom of speech and human rights as connected to literature. Rushdie has served the organization in various capacities, and was one of those who founded the international writers section and conferences. These are full of personal stories, musings on the true meaning of freedom, and more. I found them interesting, but not everyone will be as into the shop talk that is inevitable.
The best parts are definitely the impassioned defense of art against the machinations of government and ideology, both of which tend to see art as just another tool for them to exploit, which is why freedom of expression is so vital to a healthy society. Rushdie also advocates for writers to continue to believe that they can change the world, despite the realities of the present day.
In 1986 it still felt natural for writers to claim to be, as Shelley said, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” to believe in the literary art as the proper counterweight to power, and to see literature as a lofty, transnational, transcultural force. In our dumbed-down, homogenized, frightened present-day culture, under the thumbs of leaders who seem to think of themselves as God’s anointed and of power as their divine right, it is harder to make such exalted claims for mere wordsmiths. Harder, but no less necessary.
That’s one reason I continue to write, even though I often despair of ever convincing a single right winger to reconsider. Indeed, the work of writers is crucial to pushing back against the present campaign to whitewash (in both senses of the word) the racial history and present of the United States being waged by the American Right. The fact that there is so much fear of writers of color and non-white perspectives in history and literature actually is evidence of the power that the written word has.
Rushdie goes on to advocate for foreign writers - something I can very much get behind!
At the heart of PEN’s work is our effort to defend writers under attack by powerful interests who fear and threaten them. Those voices, Arab or Afghan or Latin American or Russian, need to be magnified, so that they can be heard loud and clear, just as the Soviet dissidents once were. Yet, in America, unlike in Europe, a lamentably small percentage of all the fiction and poetry published each year is translated from other languages. It has perhaps never been more important for the world’s ideas and dreams to be known and thought about and discussed, never more important for a global dialogue to be fostered. Yet one has the sense of things shutting down, of barriers being erected, of that dialogue being stifled precisely when we should be doing our best to amplify it. The Cold War is over, but a stranger war has begun. Alienation has perhaps never been so widespread; all the more reason for getting together and seeing what bridges can be built.
That’s compelling. I try to read books in translation regularly, but, as Rushdie notes, the US is pretty bad about that, in large part because those of us who seek out translated books appear to be too few to pay the costs back. That is sad, and I hope my kids’ generation (who read quite a bit, particularly compared to my parents’ generation), can change that. They certainly seem more cosmopolitan in general. I myself try to read books in translation regularly - you can see the list of blog posts about these books here.
Rushdie’s PEN speech from 2017 nails what we are up against in the Trump Era.
From the highest and most powerful places in America we face an attack on the arts, and beyond the arts on journalism, and beyond journalism on the idea of truth itself: truth as objective, beyond personal opinion or prejudice, truth meaning the primacy of facts - facts backed up by evidence. We face a moment in which untruth pollutes our lives on a daily basis and in which bigots - bigoted against the media, yes, but also against immigrants, Mexicans, minorities, the LGBTQ community, women, and so-called elites -- seem to have been set free by the result of the presidential election, and consequently our public discourse has already been greatly disfigured.
Yes. Yes indeed. And the damage lingers even though Trump is not in office. His “Big Lie” continues to be believed by a large majority of his voters, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Rushdie then goes on to address something that has greatly bothered me over the last several years. Soon after I came out against Trump on my blog, a commenter called me an “elite.” Which puzzled me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, and I am by no means rich or powerful. I run a small law office in a small city. My wife works as an ICU nurse in a local hospital. My eldest two kids are attending a local community college. My primary commuting vehicle is a 16-year-old truck. There is nothing “elite” about me other than, perhaps, the fact that I have a degree. But that isn’t what “elite” means in this context, of course. It is a term of abuse flung at people who believe in truth and evidence and equality and basic human decency. Here is what Rushdie says, and major props for saying it.
May I parenthetically object to the distortion in the meaning of the word “elites”? How is it allowed to happen that a government of billionaires and bankers, in which is accumulated more wealth than in any previous government in American history, is able to dismiss its adversaries as elites while claiming to speak for the masses? Very few novelists or journalists own private planes or clubs in Florida or New Jersey. Very few of these supposed out-of-touch elites live lives so utterly sequestered from ordinary people as this cabinet of billionaires. And yet we are the elites? Let’s start by reclaiming this single word. Let’s call things by their proper names. We are facing the most shamelessly elitist administration in the history of the United States. Anyone who doesn’t see that, to paraphrase something Stephen King said the other day, isn’t paying attention.
And, for that matter, the policies are totally fucking elitist! Endless tax cuts for the ultrarich, deregulation of business, union breaking, opposition to wage increases, termination of access to healthcare for the bottom half of society, and the list goes on. Not to mention the exclusion of brown-skinned people from the country and from voting rights. I think what “elitist” is really a euphemism for an older epithet directed at white people who supported the Civil Rights Movement: “N----r Lover.” And I proudly wear that one just like I wear “Social Justice Warrior” as a badge of honor.
I don’t have any quotes to share from it, but Rushdie’s tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens was outstanding. They were personal friends, but I too can say that Hitchens was a key figure in my deconstruction process - not because we agreed on religious matters, but because he made me think, and consistently took on all religions and ideologies. I miss him too.
Related to that obituary is “The Liberty Instinct,” which is a powerful defense of liberty and freedom from religion. There are several outstanding quotes from this one that really resonate with my own experiences of toxic fundamentalism within my family and faith tradition. (My wife’s experiences in her cultic group too…)
“Know your place” was the message of the gods from the earliest times. But liberty is precisely the idea that one need not know one’s place but rather construct for oneself a place that feels right.
For me, I find the idea of “finding” rather than “knowing” one’s place to be found in the New Testament, in the idea of everyone functioning in accordance with their gift, not their assigned place. But, of course, for Fundamentalists of all stripes, keeping people in their places is the core belief. Particularly women, of course, who have always been targeted. My wife’s refusal to “know her place” was what ultimately caused her to be rejected by my parents, and what caused my wife to be shunned by members of her cult. They had no use for a woman who thought for herself, made her own decisions without consulting a male, and pursued her calling. Oh, and on a very related note:
Growing up is our first experience of the phenomenon of liberty, for which another term might be “thinking for oneself.” At a certain point, we all begin to formulate our own picture of the world, and if it is at odds with the picture our parents made for us, then very often we discard the old picture in favor of the new one, and if this causes problems between ourselves and our parents, then we have to face those problems. (Or run away from them.) The gods cease to be gods, and we begin to be autonomous beings.
Sigh. This didn’t go well for me. The entire point of Gothard’s cult (and so many other Culture War organizations) is to ensure - to promise parents - that their children will never think for themselves, but will simply believe their parents’ picture. Or else. And when many of us realized that the Fundie - and Right Wing - picture of the world was horseshit on a stick, this, as Rushdie says, “causes problems.” So, starting with my teens, there has always been a background fight between me and my parents over this picture, from my rejection of Gothard’s racist (and musically indefensible) views on “black” music, to my wife’s clothing and career, to the books we let our children read. Oh, and I stopped putting up with the bigotry too. And along the way, I found I couldn’t live with the toxic religion even in small doses.
The essay goes on to look at ethics in a world where religious authorities no longer are unquestioned. And he nails it.
As for the second question, the question of ethics, I decided long ago that I didn’t need the advice of Catholic priests or Wahhabi mullahs on that subject. The child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, and the authoritarian and even murderous crimes carried out by Wahhabi Islam’s most powerful patrons, the Saudi ruling family, would convince me that the ideologies to which they adhere are not the best resources from which to develop an ethical worldview.
No shit. And this is why I am done with organized religion. I have, since my childhood, increasingly made peace with a more metaphoric understanding of religion generally, and of the stuff in my own scripture which is clearly and obviously not meant to be taken as literal fact. Hell, even Augustine, for all his issues with misogyny, saw Genesis as mythical, not literal history. But what I could not do was accept that appallingly amoral - antimoral even - people and ideologies had one fucking bit of credibility in telling me how to live. Or particularly how to run a government. If you can’t even get basic human decency right, then why the hell should I listen to you about anything else? I’m not checking my brain at the door, obviously. But how DARE you expect that I should check my conscience at the door as well. (And this goes for my parents too. I do not understand why I or my wife should consider you a credible source of advice or guidance, given your xenophobia and misogyny. Or why we would give any weight to the misogynist rules of the cults we intentionally left. None of them made any sort of a case for why they should be considered a credible resource for an ethical worldview.)
The next essay I want to mention is “The Half-Woman God.” The main subject of the piece is the hijra tradition in India. To call hijras “transgender” is to miss a good bit of nuance, but it is a good start. They existed in India (and elsewhere in south Asia) since antiquity, just as “two spirit” people date back as far as records go in the Americas. It wasn’t until the British arrived that they were targeted for persecution, discrimination, and extermination - which unfortunately continues today. The “western” tradition seems to have become the worst in persecution of LGBTQ people, and I believe that is directly related to the vicious misogyny that dates at least back to Aristotle. After all, if women are defective and malformed subhumans, then the existence of people who cannot be neatly classified as either human or not is a threat to the entire system. The essay is written by one actually familiar with the hijra in the context of culture, and with compassion and desire for justice. As one hijra says, “We also are part of creation.”
I think this is perhaps my greatest frustration with Right Wingers on the issue of LGBTQ rights. Why is it so hard to admit that LGBTQ people are part of creation just like everyone else, and therefore entitled to the same human rights? Yes, I know, misogyny, but still. I personally believe that LGBTQ people are not only a part of creation, but a crucial part of the human social ecosystem. We are unhealthy when we exclude them, and we lose part of our own humanity.
Included in the collection are a couple of commencement addresses given by Rushdie. He is a great speaker, and his speeches are excellent - definitely not the boring sorts often given, but also highly appropriate and challenging. I want to quote a few lines. In the first one, given to Nova Southeastern University in 2006, starts off by talking about Flaubert and his book, Bouvard and Pecuchet, two retired clerks who decide to live their lives by using how-to books. With predictably comic results. Rushdie quotes a few of the stupid aphorisms from the book, but I particularly liked his own description of what Flaubert was after:
Flaubert was fascinated by the general stupidity of most human beings, by their ability to absorb and parrot cliches and other nuggets of fool’s gold as if they were the wisdom of the gods.
Heck yes. As Bonhoeffer acidly said, the worst people are not the vicious, but the stupid, because their stupidity allows them to think slogans and talking points are wisdom, and follow a charismatic leader into genocide. This has been a particularly devastating realization in the Trump Era. Too many people I used to think were capable of critical thinking have retreated into 1980s slogans and cliches and parade them out as if they were an actual argument, rather than just a means of tribal identification and a way to avoid actual thought. By “stupidity,” both Bonhoeffer and I mean something more akin to what in Proverbs is termed “folly.” It isn’t raw intelligence – plenty of developmentally disabled people are no fools – it is a moral stupidity. An insensibility to what is actually true or actually morally decent.
Next up is the address to Emory University in 2015. See how Rushdie takes the idea of inspiration and makes it so amazing.
Here’s something Toni Morrison tells her students. “The world is interesting and difficult,” she says. “Happiness? Don’t settle for that.” Now, I don’t think Toni Morrison is actually telling you not to be happy - because after all, happiness, or at least the pursuit of happiness, is a constitutional right in America. I think she is telling you that happiness is not enough. Because, there it is, out there, waiting for you: the grand and appalling human reality, its elation, its despondency, its danger, its dentistry. Be greedy for it. Grab great handfuls of it and stuff it in your pockets, your mouths, or whatever you most like stuffing things. The best response to the vastness of the unknown is to be larger than life. If life is, as Toni Morrison says, difficult and interesting, be larger than that. Be more difficult, more interesting, and you’ll be fine.
Try not to be small. Try to be larger than life.
He goes on to talk specifically about fiction.
One of the things I’ve learned as a writer is voraciousness. The novelist’s art is in many ways a vulgar art, it’s about life as it is really lived, it’s the opposite of an ivory-tower form. The novelist’s job, as I see it anyway, is to plunge his hands as deep into the stuff of life as he can, all the way up to the elbows, all the way up to the armpits, and come up with the stuff of life--what’s really going on in people’s heads, what music is in there, what movies, what dreams, which Kardashians--and then to deliver his reports.
It’s not such a bad plan for life either. (Apart from the Kardashian part. If possible, avoid that part.)
He then goes on to urge the students to avoid the siren songs, the false promises of our society. As he puts it, how not to make jackasses of yourselves. And damn is he right about it.
Let me tell you the tool you need to avoid that fate: skepticism. You need to have, and refine, and hone, what Ernest Hemingway said every writer needs: a good shit detector. (Once again, good advice for writers turns out to be excellent advice for life.) The world in which you have grown up is unusually full of crap. In the information age, the quantity of disinformation has grown exponentially. If you seek the truth, beware. Maybe you’ve come across the famous saying of President Abraham Lincoln. “The Internet,” Lincoln said, “is full of false quotations.”
Here is the thing. The world is indeed unusually full of shit. More specifically, bullshit. That is, stuff for which its truthfulness is irrelevant. Trump succeeded because a hell of a lot of people in this country swallowed his bullshit. If I were to say what I think the fundamental problem my parents had and still have, it is that they seem to have never developed a bullshit detector. So they fell for charlatans of all kinds: medical, political, but especially religious. And fine, everyone makes mistakes. But when something is pointed out as bullshit, not truth, shouldn’t one change one’s mind rather than double down? My problem was that I did have a good shit detector and started calling out bullshit in my teens; but since the Fundie subculture labels people like me as “rebellious,” my concerns were dismissed at best, and seen as evidence of the Devil’s work at worst. Ultimately, loyalty to the bullshit meant more than I did to them. And that is sad and horrifying. It’s not just my parents, of course. It is most of their generation of white people. It is my former faith tradition, where they are continuing to spiral down into conspiracy theories like Q Anon and anti-vaxx and Trump's Big Lie. It is a fundamental disconnect with reality. Rushdie notes a bunch of other symptoms in our society, from veganism to Scientology. And especially Ayn Rand, who he notes with horror got four of the top ten places in a Modern Library poll. (L. Ron Hubbard got three! WTF???) This is particularly sad because they are mediocre (Rand) to amateurish (Hubbard) writers.
I greatly appreciate that Rushdie avoids the mistake that most of his generation - he’s in his 70s - make when it comes to younger generations. Here is what he has to say:
Maybe you will be the beady-eyed generation that starts seeing through the disinformation, the badly imagined blah, the lies. If you can do that, if you can scrape away all the layers of gibberish that are being poured daily over the wonders of the world, maybe you’ll be the generation that reminds itself that it is, indeed, a wonderful world, and gets rid of the various kinds of snake-oil salesmen who are selling a world they made up for their own benefit.
I hope you are. We, my generation, we haven’t made such a good fist of our time on earth, and it’s right, I think, that I apologize to you publicly for the mess we are leaving, the whole ecological, fanatical, oligarchic mess, in which 1 percent of the country gets everything, while kids are daily being killed for the crime of being black; in which religious bigots in this country think Jesus wants them not to sell cupcakes to gay couples, while religious bigots elsewhere think their god approves of sawing off the heads of innocent men.
We thought of ourselves, my lot, as tolerant and progressive, and we are leaving you an intolerant and retrogressive world. But it’s a resilient place, the world, and its beauty is still breathtaking, its potential still astonishing, and as for the mess we’ve made, you can change it, and I believe you are going to. I have a suspicion you’re better than us, you care more for the planet, you’re less bigoted, more tolerant, and your ideals may hold up better than ours did.
Wow. I swear he is the first fucking Baby Boomer who I ever heard apologize for making the world a far worse place than they found it. Because that is what their generation did. They took the progress made through the 70s, and burned it to the fucking ground. And sure, Not All Boomers™. But enough of them. And they are still in fucking power now, actively working to destroy voting rights, the environment, and the integrated society. And getting their panties in a wad over the accurate teaching of the sordid parts of our history. Is it that hard to admit that voting for Reagan damaged the world for their grandchildren? Or is maintaining their sense of superiority over other generations the most important thing to them? (Don’t answer that….) So major props to Rushdie - who isn’t even the sort of Boomer who has been the problem - for admitting reality and apologizing. And - I think more to the point - it is time for them to stop doing damage, and let the rest of us fix what they did. I think my kids will probably spend their entire lives trying to clean up the shit that white Boomers left for them.
The fourth and final section was definitely the least expected one. It focuses on non-literary arts, including painting and photography, and demonstrates that Rushdie isn’t just a great writer, he is perceptive about a wide range of things. The best part of this section, to me, was the way that he introduces artists that many of us white folks are probably not that familiar with - I wasn’t.
The first essay is about the Hamzanama. Are you familiar with it? One might call it one of the early graphic novels, perhaps, or an epic collection of illustrations. Whatever you call it, it was originally 1200 (!!) paintings illustrating the entire "Adventures of Amir Hamza,” an oral epic that rivals The Odyssey and other ancient fantastic tales. The young Indian emperor Akbar commissioned the work - kind of ironic since his father hated the stories - rebellion against philistine parents is timeless, apparently. In addition to giving the history, Rushdie also notes how many parallels there are between the various mythologies and epics around the world.
The overcoming of monsters, the desire for an idea of nobility, the love of magic, the need for a quest, the addiction to the story: It may be that these are the things the human race has most profoundly in common, that in our dream lives and our waking imaginations we are indeed of one kind.
Rushdie has a particular love for Indian artists - no surprise there - and it was fun to discover some of his favorites. The first one is Amrita Sher-Gil. Rushdie patterned one of his characters after her, and spends his essay talking about her personality, as evidenced by her letters. Openly bisexual, she struggled with her parents’ hostility and rejection of her art and personality and especially her acid way with words. She was certainly not the “nice, quiet” woman that she was expected to be, and that is putting it mildly. She also had no use for the “narrow-minded, prejudiced and fanatical” people that she saw around the world, not just in India, and refused to view her sexuality as immoral. In one letter to her father, after he accused her of not caring about India, she gets to the heart of the issue:
“I was rather sad to realize that you place the conservation of your good name above your affection for us.”
He was more concerned that his bigoted peers not see him as accepting his “immoral” daughter, than he was with having a relationship with her. Damn, that resonates, and hits really close to home for me.
Other artists that he highlights are Bhupen Khakhar, Francesco Clemente, Taryn Simon, Kara Walker, and Sebastiao Salgado. None of these were familiar to me, but their works are well worth examining.
One essay in this section seems a bit odd - it probably is there because there is nowhere else to put it - tells of how the Rushdie family celebrates Christmas. Yes, and Indian atheist and his family celebrate it - because they live in the UK, and the kids, naturally, wanted to participate. Among other things, it is a wry observation of how cultural touchstones are often both religious and secular, and complicated for immigrants who lack the underlying belief system. As someone who is no longer part of the Evangelical tradition, Christmas has been…complicated. My kids are not religious at all, and I have a lot of baggage related to the Christmas Wars™ which were crammed down our throats at our former church. (Yes, that is a whole story - one I have partly told here and there.) The beautiful thing about Rushdie’s approach is that they were able to find a balance that allowed them to celebrate the cultural parts, without having to literally believe a religion that they do not embrace. His final paragraph is great:
We are, I think, a funny bunch, we Rushdies, and so the day is full of laughter. We are not like those movie families (and not just movie families) whose get-togethers are like little wars. We all get along and have a great day and if, in some way, it’s all because of the baby Jesus, then we agree not to mind. Thank you, baby Jesus, from this godless bunch. We don’t believe in you but here we are anyway, celebrating family and fellowship and love, and that is an annual bright deed in a darkening world.
In some ways, it was hard to read this. When I was a kid, our family Christmases were wonderful, full of love and happiness and closeness. I had looked forward to continuing that after marriage and kids. But it was not to be. Soon after I moved out, my sister started trying to exert control over the holiday, and eventually, it devolved into a pattern of bullying and abuse of my wife at every family gathering. We haven’t participated in extended family gatherings for a number of years as a result. I’m jealous of the Rushdies, who found a way to avoid the wars.
One particularly fun passage talks about how he got a tour of the Kings College chapel, including the skeleton of the famous fan vaulting. (Beyond cool - I am insanely jealous.)
“Be careful,” Mr. Saltmarsh said, “because there are places where the stone is less than a half inch thick, and if you step on it you’ll fall through and leave a nasty hole. It’s eighty feet down, and in addition, people will be very cross with you.”
The story comes in because the young Rushdie lived in the same hostel as some of the singers, and he got excruciatingly tired of hearing all the practice. (He admits it was probably a combination of overexposure and his own insecurity about his lack of musical talent.)
This sounds like a good opportunity to plug the marvelous period-instrument performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Kings College Choir, available on YouTube.
Another truly moving essay was his tribute to the late Carrie Fisher after her death. They met in 1997, and formed a close friendship, that he describes delightfully. He doesn’t gloss over her mental health issues either - he accepted and loved her as the complete person, good and bad - and I admire that.
He opens the essay with a reference to When Harry Met Sally - the famous quote that “Men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.” And then goes on to demolish that idea - he felt it was completely wrong when he first heard it, because he always had female friends along with the male.
I completely agree, and for the same reasons. I may blog someday about that, and why I believe that that pernicious idea (and the Mike Pence Rule that goes with it) are bullshit, and bullshit calculated to deny women equal access to society.
Along with Rushdie, I want to call bullshit on the whole idea. Men and women not only CAN be friends without sex getting in the way, they SHOULD be friends. We all would be much richer if we did so - certainly my life is far richer because of my many friendships with women. Here is how Rushdie ends the essay:
I loved her, and I believe she loved me. I offer this account of our friendship as my answer to Billy Crystal/”Harry Burns.” It was a friendship. Nothing else. And that was plenty.
The penultimate piece is the most recent, entitled “Pandemic,” and talking about his own experience with Covid early in the pandemic - indeed, before the shutdowns. Having several underlying issues that made him vulnerable, he is grateful that his case never got bad enough for a hospitalization. And he had numerous people he knew die of it, so he is certainly not a denialist. Rather, he does a devastating takedown of those who made this so much worse than it should have been.
It is part of the tragedy that in this time of crisis we are cursed, in many countries, including all three of those I have most cared about in my life, with leaders of astonishing cynicism and bad faith. In India, Narendra Modi’s government used the pandemic to put the blame on Muslims. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson (in spite of having had and recovered from the virus himself) handled the crisis with stunning incompetence, at first downplaying the dangers (like Trum), reacting too little and too late (also like Trump), and continuing to play the Brexiteers’ anti-immigrant card (like Trump yet again), in spite of the fact that both the primary carers who looked after him in the hospital were immigrants and the British National Health Service as a whole depends on their skills and courage. And in Trump’s America, where nothing was unthinkable, in that country without a moral floor, so that no matter how low he and his followers sank, there was always a lower level to sink to -- in Trumpistan, the virus (like everything else) was politicized, minimized, called a Democrat trick; the science was derided, the administration’s lamentable response to the pandemic was obscured by a blizzard of lies, wearers of masks were abused by red hats, and the mountain of the dead went on growing, unmourned by the self-obsessed charlatan who claimed, in the face of all the evidence, that he was making America great again.
To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more.
Oh man, so much to unpack. First, just as a start, my wife was indeed borderline assaulted by some “red hats” for wearing a mask. She and her colleagues have been threatened, abused, bullied, insulted and called liars throughout the pandemic by so many Trump followers. It has taken its toll.
Second, it should be self-apparent that our healthcare systems globally depend on people of color - and the Trumps and Johnsons of the world who draw their support from fanning the flames of racism have proven to be total hypocrites when they have needed medical care themselves.
Third, Rushdie is right that it may take generations to undo the damage MAGAheads have done to our social fabric. The economic damage to so many of our economic sectors alone is appalling - and a better response to the pandemic would have prevented a lot of that, by supporting small businesses during the lockdowns and allowing safe reopening by the “test, trace, isolate, and vaccinate” approach much of the rest of the first world has done. (We have basically gotten our asses handed to us by countries as diverse as New Zealand, South Korea, most of Europe and most of Africa. That’s embarrassing.) But the economic damage will heal a lot faster than the damage to the “social, cultural, and political” fabric of our society. And the cause of that damage is the outpouring of hatred, bigotry, and hostility to both science and the very idea of the common good that the Right Wing has been carefully cultivating during my lifetime. There are a lot of relationships that cannot ever heal, because there is no coming back from what people said and did.
Finally, Rushdie touches on the devastation that so many of us feel in discovering that there truly is no moral floor in our country. As I said before Trump’s election to a relative, I feared there was literally no amount of racism that would bother white Evangelicals enough to make them vote against Trump. I was wrong. In reality, Trump’s racism was the number one reason they loved him. Racism was the moral core of their politics.
And it wasn’t just our country not having a moral floor. I have watched so many people I loved and thought I knew demonstrate that they too had no moral floor. I kept waiting for something, anything that would turn out to be a bridge too far for them. And for most of them, I am still waiting. Even an attempted fascist coup wasn’t too much. They may not like Trump’s style, but they love that he hurts people they hate.
Okay, after this depressing truth, it was nice that the book ended with a short and light bit - a “Proust Questionnaire” from Vanity Fair. In it, Rushdie’s responses are amusing and thoughtful. But this one is the best:
Where would you like to live?
On bookshelves. Forever.
Me too, Salman, me too, even if I am likely to be there as a dog-eared bookmark, veteran of a lifetime of reading, rather than as a beloved author.
Seriously, though. Get this book. It is amazing, Rushdie is an amazing and thoughtful writer, and anyone who loves literature, liberty, art, or the human spirit will find something to enjoy in this collection.
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