Rushdie, [Ahmed] Salman, (1947-), novelist and short story
writer, born in Bombay to a Muslim family, educated at the Cathedral
School, Rugby, and King's College, Cambridge.
He worked for a time in
television in Pakistan, as an actor in London, and as an advertising
copywriter. Rushdie's bicultural upbringing informs all his work. He
draws on the allegorical fable-making traditions of both East and West
and is often classed amongst the exponents of magic realism—the
narrative style in which the realistic mingles with the fantastic and
the inexplicable.
His first novel, Grimus (1975), was a fantasy based on a medieval Sufi poem and was followed by Midnight's Children
(1981), the book that brought him to literary prominence and which won
the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke
of midnight on the day India was granted independence and whose life
becomes emblematic of the political and social destiny of the new
nation.
In Shame (1983) the subject is Pakistan, the struggle
between military and civilian rule, and the culture of shame and honour
which oppresses women; the historical figures wear satirical and
allegorical disguise, but the narrative is interrupted by direct
autobiographical interventions from the author.
The Satanic Verses
(1988) is a jet-propelled panoramic novel shich moves with dizzying
speed from the streets and film studios of Bombay to multicultural
Britain, from Argentina to Mount Everest, as Rushdie questions illusion,
reality, and the power of faith and tradition in a world of hijackings,
religious pilgrimages and warfare, and celluloid fantasy. Certain
passages were interpreted by some Muslims as blasphemous and brought
upon Rushdie the notorious sentence of death, or fatwa, invoked by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, which obliged him to seek police protection.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a
novel for children about a boy-hero who has to combat the enemy of
storytelling, Prince Kahttam-Shud, was published in 1990 (adapted for
the stage at the National Theatre, 1998), and Imaginary Homelands, a collection of critical journalism and interviews, in 1991.
In 1994 Rushdie published his first collection of short stories, East, West,
which, written on the cultural cusp between two traditions, also
confronts the conflicting claims of the real and the imagined. The Moor's Last Sigh
(1995) is a dense and exuberant study of cultural and personal
inheritance narrated in the first person by Moraes Zogoiby—the 'Moor' of
the title—who ages at twice the normal rate.
Some critical notes on Salman Rushdie from various sources:
From Michael Gorra in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti:
Rushdie's novels are as keenly attuned as Naipaul's to issues of
cultural fracture, of worlds and histories and values in collision. Yet
his work suggests not a tragic awareness but a ready acceptance of the
fact that cultures are never inviolate. "Perhaps we are all," he writes,
"black and brown and white, leaking into one another . . . like flavours when you cook."
Hence his gloriously ramshackle sentences, in which Bombay street slang
flirts with Oxbridge English, a style in which, as in the poems of Baal
in The Satanic Verses, "the demotic force[s] its way into lines
of classical purity and images of love [are] constantly degraded by the
intrusions of elements of farce." That style grows from Rushdie's
attempt in Midnight's Children to use the English language as a
way of imagining a from for India itself, "that 5000 year old country
that has never before existed." But to do that he must first free
English from its colonial past, remaking it into a new Indian language
called Angrezi, the master's tongue appropriated for his own subversive
purposes. Yet Angrezi's essential impurity contests not just the
ideology of colonialism but that of India's "folkloristic straitjacket"
as well. For Rushdie's refashioning of the language puts English at the
heart of modern India's national identity in a way that challenges the
nativist assumption that one can be perfectly non-Western. His style is
an attempt to acknowledge India's heterogeneous history and complex
heritage, to envision a structure in which all its multiple divisions of
region and religion and language and caste can be contained. And his
work as a whole stands as a model of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the
"dialogic" novel: a linguistic carnival, a polyphony of voices that
turns all ideological certainties upside down, a quite literally
heteroglot forum for an encounter not just between opposing characters
but between different beliefs, languages, levels of discourse, and
indeed whole cultures.
The Satanic Verses takes up such issues through its critique of
the idea of cultural purity, the "terrifying singularity" of Islam, in a
way that enacts within the novel itself the very storm that has grown
up around it. It recasts Midnight's Children in terms of the
individual migrant whom Rushdie takes as the emblematic figure of our
times. Migration makes the self indeterminate. For the migrant has
chosen to translate one identity into another, and in doing so has set
out "to make himself up." What Rushdie suggests is that such
postcolonial selves should actively choose the hand that history has
dealt them. If for Naipaul mimicry is a sign of cultural violation, for
Rushdie a self-concious mimicry becomes a way to shuttle between the
hybrid selves of the postcolonial condition, to acknowledge that one
lives in two worlds at once. And in that acceptance of discontinuity he
sees not tragedy but liberation. It does not help the postcolonial man
or woman surmount dependency so much as it denies its relevance, for
without an ideal of culturl purity against which to measure the self,
there can be no mimicry per se. Instead Rushdie posits a self that is
rather like one of his own sentences, Indian and yet English too. And
indeed he suggests that we all reject what Lawrence called "the old
stable ego of the character" and learn instead to revel in its
instability, even as we do in his style. The self becomes a pastiche,
like the India Rushdie describes as "borrowing whatever clothes seemed
to fit," a collage, a set of masks improvised for different occasions.
It is the point at which the postcolonial and the postmodern coalesce.
Where Naipaul sees a cultural violation, Rushdies sees at least the
possibility of freedom from an imprisoning authenticity. The pursuit of
such an authenticity has led, in India, to the rise of linguistic and
religious separatism on the one hand, and Hindu fundamentalism on the
other. It has led, most famously, to the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against The Satanic Verses,
to demands for its author's death, and to Rushdie's continued life in
hiding. And in England it has led to the nativism of the National Front,
with its cries of "Wogs out!" Throughout this chapter we have seen the
ways in which English writers drew, blurred, and insisted on the lines
of racial difference that separated them from the subject peoples of
their empire. Rushdie's work challenges those barriers, and in doing so
helps construct an identity for a kind of man or woman that Kipling
could not have imagined. Along with several other writers of his
generation—Timothy Mo, Hanif Kureishi, Caryl Phillips—he shows the ways
in which it is possible to be English and yet not white. And that is
even one of naipaul's themes in The Enigma of Arrival, an account of how he finally came to see himself at home in the chalk hills of Wiltshire.
"They have the power of description," a tiger-headed character in The Satanic Verses says
of the white society in which he lives, "and we succumb to the pictures
they construct." For seeing India, or Africa, or the Caribbean is
indeed a way of ruling them. One consequence of the end of the British
Empire is that they have started to describe themselves.
__________________
From Michael Wood's chapter, "The Contemporary Novel" in The Columbia History of the British Novel:
MIDNIGHT'S FICTIONS
"London is full of short stories walking round hand in hand," the narrator says in Martin Amis's Money
(1984). And not just London. The 1980s witnessed an astonishing rebirth
of storytelling in British fiction. The stories might be desolate, or
even insane, but there were plenty of them, and they were full of
emotional or intellectual energy, untapped for generations while
novelists attended to more serious matters. "Oh dear, yes," Forster had
said, "the novel tells a story"—a regrettable necessity rather than any
sort of challenge. What vanishes in recent British writing is the note
of polite regret, to be replaced by a slightly febrile excitement: everyone has a story, always has had, what we are waiting for.
This shift cannot be attributed to a single writer, but if it could that writer would be Salman Rushdie, whose Midnight's Children (1980) effected a massive, garrulous liberation in British fiction—the tall tales of Waterland,
for instance, are scarcely imaginable without it. Rushdie himself
declared his debt to Günter Grass ("he opened doors in my mind"), and
wrote appreciatively of García Márquez, and has predictably been labeled
a magic realist. The debts are real enough, but the label is
misleading. Fiction for Rushdie, in Midnight's Children as in Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988) is a means of interrogating the real rather than celebrating its variety.
The central fable of the early novel, a telepathic generation of 1,001
children born in the first hour of India's independence in 1947, which
is also the first hour of the partition of India and Pakistan, is a
metaphor for missed possibilities rather than found marvels. They are
the India that might have been, the promise that difficult midnight was
unable to keep. This is what the narrator calls "the fantastic heart" of
his story:
Reality
can have a metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A
thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one
possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time
before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children
can be made to represent many things . . .
And again: "Who am I? Who were we? We were are shall be the gods you never had." That, despairing as it may seem, is the optimistic reading, and at other times Rushdie's generally cheery narrator has darker thoughts: "Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed . . . I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed."
India itself is imaginary for Rushdie, "a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream." But then the imaginary is not opposed to the real, it is a large part of it. Agreed dreams are just what countries are, India is exemplary but not exceptional, and Rushdie's later work, addressing the dictatorship in an imaginary nation that much resembles Pakistan, and the crazed redrawings of the world in which fundamentalisms of all kinds indulge, continues to mingle fiction and history, or rather to confront those two forms of narative with each other, revealing the (rather tawdry) novels that pass for historical fact, and the deep historicity of what seem to be wild imaginings.
The terrible fate of The Satanic Verses, banned in India and many other countries, burned by Muslims in Bradford, England, announces the even worse fate of its author, sentenced to death by an outraged Iranian government, and at the time of this writing still living in hiding, with round-the-clock police protection. Such a situation confirms Rushdie's own darkest intuitions. In this sprawling and bustling novel, which takes us from Bombay to South London, from Argentina to Everest, a group of monsters, humans half-turned into tigers, demons, snakes, wolves, water buffalo, meet up in a hospital, and offer a simple explanation of their monstrosity. "They describe us," the monsters say. They:
the others, the white, the normal, the officers of a homogenized
culture. We might add: the tyrants, the bigots, all who care more for
their own mythologies than for the discernible reality of others.
"That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct."
We succumb. There is passivity here and Rushdie is implicitly arguing
against it, but there is also a precise evocation of how description
works when it becomes effective currency, or the only currency; how diffeicult it is to escape even the most fantastic and unlikely identity once it is firmly ascribed to you. And once someone has a stake in the ascription.
Rushdie's fiction tells a story, but it allso tells the story's story; the narrator narrates his narrating. It could not be otherwise in a world so saturated with stories, and yet Martin Amis manages to go Rushdie one better. His Money is subtitled "A Suicide Note," and the idea, it seems, is that the narrator, the boisterous, violent, drunken, unlovable John Self, will be dead by the time we get to the end of the text. "You can never tell, though, with suicide
notes, can you?" Amis writes in a preface, and sure enough John Self
seems to survive, a beneficiary of life's kindness to bastards. But then
within this rambling, pushy, often very funny tale, a tribute to Amiss's ability to find an English that is not mid-Atlantic but transatlantic, and amazing mixture of American slang and British snot, there is tis writer, a fellow called . . . Martin Amis. Does he survive along with Self? What would Self have made of Flaubert's parrot?
Money is probably the strongest of all Amis's very clever novels, because the sheer nastiness of the central character fuels a seemingly inexhaustible wit. John Self on the tennis court, John Self trying (in vain) to rape his girlfriend, John Self exploring pornography, John Self throwing up in various choice locations—these are all set pieces that argue a kind of dark love for the horrors of the contemporary world, as if its very tackiness made it a candidate for affection. And the prose has fine, fulsome metaphors: "I am still a high-risk zone. I am still inner city."
My
head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in
various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative
on my upper west side. Across the park, neruralgia has rented a duplex
in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of
jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it's Harlem up there, expanding
in the summer fires.
There are cities and cities, though. Glasgow is described in Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981) as "the sort of industrial city where most people live nowadays but nobody imagines living." It would be hard to imagine. The gloom and drabness of Gray's Glasgow is paralleled only by that of the same city seen by his grimly amused companion James Kelman. Both Glasgows make Amis's sleazy London and Ne York seem perfectly pastoral places by comparison. Yet, gloomy as the scene is, it provokes some of the most stylish and imaginative writing to have appeared in Britain recently. Gray and Kelman, like Rushdie and Amis, are writers for whom literature exists; they don't hide their reading as a previous generation was wont to do. Indeed
they flaunt their allusions with a carelessness that is the reverse of
the pretention British writers have always so feared. "To be alone and
without gods is death says Hölderlin," we read in Kelman's Dissafection (1989), "but Hölderlin was wrong and is a poor bastard . . . Fuck Hölderlin he's deid and buried." Lanark has a long mock note of its own "plagiarisms," runing from Anon and Borges to Xenophon and Zoraster. Hamlet
is an influence, we learn, because it is a play "in which heavy-handed
paternalism forces a weak-minded youth into dread of existence,
hallucinations and crime." The story of Lanark, no less.
Apart from their Glasgow and their wit and their literayr resources Gray
and Kelman are quite different; Gray an experimentalist, juggling time
and tones, starting his book at a late stage of his story, placing his
prologue in the middle, Kelman a sort of dour, demotic Kafka, dryly
observing the follies of terminally bewildered people. Patrick Doyle, in
A Disaffection, is a Latin teacher in a bleak school, worrying a
little about his age, and Kelman's language catches Patrick's
complicated awareness of his own comic status, the self-mockery amid the
gloom: "He did not wish to dwell continually on the passing years. Here
he was turning thirty years of age. Thirty years of age is regarded as a
landmark, a watershed, a stage of departure. At that age Jesus Christ
entered the teaching profession and Joseph K. worked out his guilt."
Fiction in these novels is not an alternative to history, it is a reading of history's failures, a mode of irony. From Rushdie's teeming India through Amis's hustling England and America to Gray and Kelman's northern dampnesses, the imagination asks us to think about what is missing from these worlds, what strange losses have occurred in what ought to be human. In a lighter though not less brilliant vein the early novels of Peter Ackroyd (and indeed Ackroyd's biographies of Eliot and Dickens) explore a similar question through travels to the past, whether in the impeccable Wildean pastiche of The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), the historical crime-world of Hawksmoor (1985), or the intricate literary fakeries of Chatterton (1987). It's not that the past is another country, as L. P. Hartley memorably said in The Go-Between.The past is our country, scarcely disguised, the angled mirror of our diffuse and distressed present.
The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the satanic verses, a group of alleged Quranic verses that allow intercessory prayers to be made to three Pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt.[1] The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.[1]
In the United Kingdom, The Satanic Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize Finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.[2] However, major controversy ensued as conservative Muslims accused it of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among some Muslims resulted in a fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran,
on 14 February 1989. Although Rushdie himself has never been attacked
as a result of the book's creation, extremists have attacked several
connected individuals such as translator Hitoshi Igarashi (leading to, in Igarashi's case, death).
Plot
The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism,
interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream
visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative,
like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in
contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specializes in playing Hindu deities. (The character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and Rama Rao.[3]) Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.
At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain. The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangelGibreel,
and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an
ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's
transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of
the protagonist's developing schizophrenia.
Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta
seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but
their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha,
having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on
Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the
hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy
and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of
crisis, Farishta realizes what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and
even saves his life.
Both return to India. Farishta kills Allie in another outbreak of
jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only
forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged
father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.
Dream sequences
Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision
narratives, ascribed to the mind of Gibreel Farishta. They are linked
together by many thematic details as well as by the common motifs of
divine revelation, religious faith and fanaticism, and doubt.
One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been
criticized as offensive to Muslims. It is a transformed re-narration of
the life of Muhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) in Mecca ("Jahilia"). At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by Shaitan. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": a demonic heathen priestess, Hind,
and an irreverent skeptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet
returns to the city in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground
brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's
wives. Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting
the "Messenger"'s authenticity, has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him.
The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl
who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She
entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across the Arabian Sea.
The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk
into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies
from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact
miraculously able to cross the sea.
A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate
religious leader, the "Imam," in a late-20th-century setting. This
figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ayatollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the "Messenger".
Literary criticism and analysis
Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics.
In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, influential critic
Harold Bloom named The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".[4]
Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet
published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that
captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of
"union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in
alienation."[2]
Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is
about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and
conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with
both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing
they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The Satanic Verses
is a reflection of the author’s dilemmas." The work is an "albeit
surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis."[2] Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century British colonialism."[2] Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay."[2] He has also said "It’s a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Western materialism. The tone is comic."[2]
After the Satanic Verses controversy
developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of
Rushdie's work, like M. D. Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic.
Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major
expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and
(in some sense) for whom he wrote."[5]
He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain "embodied an
anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience
and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both
significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally
include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that
perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of
religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political
manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance
of literature parallel in the literal value accorded the written word
in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed
that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral
ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is
perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of
the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems."[5]
Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars
examining his work. According to W. J. Weatherby, influences on The Satanic Verses were listed as Joyce, Italo Calvino, Kafka, Frank Herbert, Pynchon, Mervyn Peake, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jean-Luc Godard, J. G. Ballard, and William Burroughs.[6] Chandrabhanu Pattanayak notes the influence of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (influences Rushdie admitted to).[5] M. Keith Booker likens the book to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.[5] Al-'Azm notes the influence of François Rabelais' works.[5] Others have noted an influence of Indian classics such as the Mahabharata and the ArabicArabian Nights.[5]Angela Carter
writes that the novel contains "inventions such as the city of Jahilia,
'built entirely of sand,' that gives a nod to Calvino and a wink to
Frank Herbert".[7] Srinivas Aravamudan’s analysis of The Satanic Verses was perceived by other scholars as hailing the book as a proof "demonstrating the compatibility of postmodernism and post-colonialism in the one novel."[5] Aravamudan himself stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it and Midnight's Children
may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly
satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in Catch-22.[5] The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for
organizing his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book
"there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality
sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in
each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the
other stories."[5]The Satanic Verses
also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions in order to
invoke connotative links. Within the book he referenced everything from
mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture" sometimes
using several per page.[5] Chapter VII was especially noted by for such usage.[5]
The novel caused great controversy in the Muslim community for what some Muslims believed were blasphemous references. Rushdie was accused of misusing freedom of speech.[8] As the controversy spread, the import of the book was banned[9] in India and it was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom. In mid February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, the AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran and a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa
calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers, or to
point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves.[10] Although the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while Conservative MP Norman Tebbit,
the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain"
whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of
his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".[11] Meanwhile the Commission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, the Policy Studies Institute held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the author Fay Weldon who spoke out against burning books, but did invite Shabbir Akhtar,
a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated
compromise" which "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous
provocation". The journalist and author Andy McSmith
wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and
dangerously illiberal "liberal" orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr
Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends."[12]
Following the fatwa, Rushdie was put under police protection by the British government. Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran
in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding,
the Iranian state news agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would
remain in place permanently since fatwas can only be rescinded by the
person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.[13]
Violence, assassinations and attempts to harm
Rushdie has never been physically harmed for the book, but others associated with it have suffered violent attacks. Hitoshi Igarashi, its Japanese translator, was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing the same month.[14]William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, was shot three times in an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993, but survived. Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, was the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in the deaths of 37 people.[15]
Individual purchasers of the book have not been harmed. The only nation
with a predominantly Muslim population where the novel remains legal is
Turkey.
In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt that The Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness".[16]
James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a
talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus
in A Portrait of the Artist as Young
Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an
oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small
landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller,
somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a
bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce
drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving
from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the
previous. James Joyce's whole education was Catholic, from the age of
six to the age of nine at Clongowes Wood College and from eleven to
sixteen at Belvedere College, Dublin. Both were Jesuit institutions and
were normal roads to the priesthood. He then studied modern
languages
at University College, Dublin.
From a comparatively early age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel
against the shabbiness and Philistinism of Dublin. In his early youth
he was very religious, but in his last year at Belvedere he began to
reject his Catholic faith in favor of a literary mission that he saw as
involving rebellion and exile. He refused to play any part in the
nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow students, and he
created some stir by his outspoken articles, one of which, on the
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, appeared in the Fortnightly Review for April 1900.
He taught himself Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen and to write to
him. When an article by Joyce, significantly titled The Day of the Rabblement, was
refused, on instructions of the faculty adviser, by the student
magazine that had commissioned it, he had it printed privately. By
1902, when he received his A.B. degree, he was already committed to a
career as an exile and writer. For Joyce, as for his character Stephen
Dedalus, the latter implied the former. To preserve his integrity, to
avoid involvement in popular sentimentalities and dishonesties, and
above all to be able to re-create with both total understanding and
total objectivity the Dublin life he knew so well, he felt that he had
to go abroad.
Joyce was sent to Paris after graduation, was recalled to Dublin by his
mother's fatal illness, had a short spell there as a schoolteacher,
then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English at Trieste and
then at Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Galway
girl with no interest in literature; her native vivacity and peasant
wit charmed Joyce, and the two lived in devoted companionship until
Joyce's death, although they were not married until 1931. In 1920 Joyce
settled in Paris, where he lived until December 1940, when the war
forced him to take refuge in Switzerland; he died in Zurich a few weeks
later.
Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits
of
sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy
person to get along with, yet he never lacked friends, and throughout
his thirty-six years on the Continent he was always the center of a
literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little
money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit
checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus, who came out from Dublin to
act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His
financial position was much improved by the patronage of Mrs. Harold
McCormick (Edith Rockefeller), who provided him with a monthly stipend
from March 1917 until September 1919, when they quarreled, apparently
because Joyce refused to submit to psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, who had
been heavily endowed by her. The New York lawyer and art patron John
Quinn, steered in Joyce's direction by Ezra Pound, also helped Joyce
financially in 1917. A more permanent benefactor was the English
feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who not only subsidized Joyce
generously from 1917 to the end of his life but occupied herself
indefatigably with arrangements for publishing his work.
Joyce's almost lifelong exile from his native Ireland had something
paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin,
its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of
his writing from Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always
about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin,
however, so that they became microcosmos, small-scale models, of all
human life, of all history, and of all geography. Indeed that was his
life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing
about all of human experience.
Joyce began his career by writing a series of stories etching with
extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life. But these
stories—published as Dubliners
in 1914—are more than sharp realistic sketches. In each, the detail is
so chosen and organized that carefully interacting symbolic meanings
are set up, and as a result, Dubliners
is a book about human fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin.
Furthermore, the stories are presented in a particular order so that
new meanings arise from the relation between them.
Tha last story in Dubliners,The Dead,
was not part of the original draft of the book but was added later, at
a time when Joyce was preoccupied with the nature of artistic
objectivity. A series of jolting events frees the protagonist,
Gabriel, from his possessiveness and egotism; the view he attains at
the end is the mood of supreme neutrality that Joyce saw as the
beginning of artistic awareness. It is the view of art developed by
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners represents
Joyce's first phase: he had come directly to terms with the meaning of
his own developement as a man dedicated to writing. He did this by
weaving his autobiography into a novel so finely chiseled and carefully
organized, so stripped of everything superfluous, that each word
contributes to the presentation of the theme: the parallel movement
toward art and toward exile. A part of Joyce's first draft has been
posthumously published under the original title of Stephen Hero (1944); a comparison
between it and the final version that Joyce gave to the world, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), will show how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his
material for maximum effect. The Portrait
is not literally true as autobiography, although it has many
autobiographical elements, but it is representatively true not only of
Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in the early
twentieth century.
In the Portrait Stephen
worked
out a theory of art that considers that art moves from the lyrical
form—which is the simplest, the personal expression of an instant of
emotion—through the narrative form—no longer purely personal—to the
dramatic—the highest and most nearly perfect form, where "the artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails." This view of art, which invokes the objectivity, even
the exile, of the artist (even though the artist uses only the
materials provided for him or her by his or her own life), is related
to that held by the poets of the 1890s. More widely, it is related to
the rejection by the artist of the ordinary world of middle-class
values and activities that we see equally, tough in different ways, in
Matthew Arnold's war against the Philistines and in the concept (very
un-Arnoldian) of the artist as bohemian. Joyce's career belongs to that
long chapter in the history of the arts in Western civilization that
begins with the artist's declaring independence and ends with his or
her feeling inevitable alienation. But if Joyce was alienated, as in
certain ways he clearly was, he made his alienation serve his art: the
kinds of writing represented by Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake
represent the most consummate craftsmanship put at the service of a
humanely comic vision of all life. Some of Joyce's innovations in
organization and style have been imitated by other writers, but these
books are, and will probably remain, unique in our literature.
From the beginning, Joyce had trouble with the Philistines. Publication
of Dubliners
was held up for many years while he fought with both English and Irish
publishers about certain words and phrases that they wished to
eliminate. (It was one of the former who finally published the book).
His masterpiece Ulysses was
banned in both Britain and America on its first appearance in 1922; its
earlier serialization in an American magazine, The Little Review
(March 1918-December 1920) had had to stop abruptly when the U.S. Post
Office brought a charge of obscenity against it. Fortunately, Judge
Woolsey's history-making decision in favour of Ulysses
in a U.S. district court on December 6, 1933, resulted in the lifting
of the ban and the free circulation of the work first in America and
soon afterward in Britain.
Ulysses
Ulysses is an account
of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904; it is
thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited
number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which
took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm
of all human experience. The events are not, therefore, told on a
single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and
implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity
of the individual in the World. The most obvious of the devices that
Joyce employs to make clear the microcosmic aspect of his story is the
parallel with Homer's Odyssey:
every episode in Ulysses
corresponds in some way to an episode in the Odyssey.
Joyce regarded Homer's Ulysses as the most "complete" man in
literature, a man who is shown in all his aspects—both coward and hero,
cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father
and son, dignified and ridiculous; so he makes his hero, Leopold Bloom,
an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses and by so doing helps make him
Everyman and make Dublin the world.
The book opens at eight o'clock on the morning of June 16, 1904.
Stephen Dedalus (the same character we saw in the Portrait,
but this is two years after our last glimpse of him there) had been
summoned back to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness and now lives in
an old military tower on the shore with Buck Mulligan, a rollicking
medical student, and and Englishman called Haines. In the first three
episodes of Ulysses,
which
concentrate on Stephen, he is built up as an aloof, uncompromising
artist, rejecting all advances by representatives of the normal world,
the incomplete man, to be contrasted later with the complete Leopold
Bloom, who is much more "normal" and conciliatory. After tracing
Stephen through his early-morning activitites and learning the main
currents of his mind, we go, in the fourth episode, to the home of
Bloom. We follow closely his every activity: attending a funeral,
transacting his business, eating his lunch, walking through the Dublin
streets, worrying about his wife's infidelity with Blazes Boylan—and at
each point the contents of his mind, including retrospect and
anticipation, are presented to the reader, until all his past history
is revealed. Finally, Bloom and Stephen, who have been just missing
each other all day, get together. By this time it is late, and Stephen,
who has been drinking with some medical students, is the worse for
liquor. Bloom, moved by a paternal feeling toward Stephen (his own son
had died in infancy and in a symbolic way Stephen takes his place),
follows him during subsequent adventures in the role of protector. The
climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom,
worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where
their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form
and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a
frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive
Stephen home and gives him a meal. After Stephen's departure Bloom
retires to bed—it is now two in the morning on June 17—while his wife,
Molly, representing the principles of sex and reproduction on which all
human life is based, closes the book with a long monologue in which her
experiences as woman are remembered.
On the level of realistic description, Ulysses
pulses with life and can be enjoyed for its evocation of early
twentieth-century Dublin. On the level of psychological exploration, it
gives a profound and moving presentation of the personality and
consciousness of Leopold Bloom and (to a lesser extent) Stephen
Dedalus. On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating
linguistic virtuosity. On a deeper symbolic level, the novel explores
the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability (for Bloom is both
Jew and Dubliner, both exile and citizen, just as all of us are in a
sense bothe exiles and citizens), and it explores the problems posed by
the relations between parent and child, between the generations, and
between the sexes. At the same time, through its use of themes from
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare and from literature, philosophy, and
history, the book weaves a subtle pattern of allusion and suggestion
that illuminates many aspects of human experience. The more one reads Ulysses,
the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to
probe into the symbolic meaning to relish both its literary artistry
and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one
point of view, a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in
which he moves, from another, a champion of kindness and justice whose
humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and
gives the book its positive human foundation.
Readers who come to Ulysses
with expectations about the way the story is to be presented derived
from their reading of Victorian novels or even of such
twentieth-century novelists as Conrad and Lawrence will find much that
is at first puzzling. Joyce presents the consciousness of his
characters directly, without any explanatory comment that tells the
reader whose consciousness is being rendered (this is the stream of
consciousness method). He may move, in the same paragraph and without
any sign that he is making such a transition, from a description of a
character's action—e.g. Stephen walking along the shore or Bloom
entering a restaurant—to an evocation of the character's mental
response to that action. That response is always multiple: it derives
partly from the character's immediate situation and partly fro the
whole complex of attitudes that his past history has created in him. To
suggest this multiplicity, Joyce may vary his style, from the flippant
to the serious or from a realistic description to a suggestive set of
images that indicate what might be called the general tone of the
character's consciousness. Past and present mingle in the texture of
the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness, and this
mingling can be indicated by puns, by sudden breaks into a new kind of
style or a new kind of subject matter, or by some other device for
keeping the reader constantly in sight of the shifting, kaleidoscopic
nature of human awareness. With a little experience, the reader learns
to follow the implications of Joyce's shifts in manner and content—even
to follow that at first sight bewildering passage in the "Proteus"
episode in which Stephen does not go to visit his uncle and aunt but,
passing the road that leads to their house, imagines the kind of
conversation that would take place in his home if he had gone to visit his uncle
and had then returned home and reported that he had done so. Ulysses
must not be approached as though it were a novel written in a
traditional manner; all preconceptions must be set aside and we must
follow wherever the author leads us and let the language tell us what
it has to say without our troubling whether language is being used
"properly" or not.
Finnegans
Wake
Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake,
was published in 1939; it took more than fourteen years to write, and
Joyce considered it his masterpiece. In Ulysses he had made the symbolic
aspect of the novel at least as important as the realistic aspect, but
in Finnegas Wake
he gave up realism altogether. This vast story of a symbolic Irishman's
cosmic dream develops by enormous reverberating puns a continuous
expansion of meaning, the elements in the puns deriving from every
conceivable source in history, literature, mythology, and Joyce's
personal experience. The whole book being (on one level at least) a
dream, Joyce invents his own dream language in which words are
combined, distorted, created by fitting together bits of other words,
used with several different meanings at once, often drawn from several
different languages at once, and fused in all sorts of ways to achieve
whole clusters of meaning simultaneously. In fact, so many echoing
suggestions can be found in every word or phrase that a full annotation
of even a few pages would require a large book. It has taken the
cooperative work of a number of devoted readers to make clear the
complex interactions of the multiple puns and pun clusters, through
which the ideas are projected, and every rereading reveals new
meanings. It is true that many readers find the efforts of explication
demanded by Finnegans Wake
too arduous; some, indeed, feel that the law of diminishing returns has
now begun to operate, and that the effort of both author and reader is
disproportionate. Nevertheless, the book has great beauty and
fascination even for the casual reader. Students are advised to read
aloud—or to listen to the record of Joyce reading aloud—the extract
printed here to appreciate the degree to which the rhythms of the prose
assist in conveying the meaning.
To an even greater extent than Ulysses,
Finnegans Wake
aims at embracing all of human history. The title is from an
Irish-American ballad about Tom Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls
off a ladder when drunk and is apparently killed, but who revives when
during the wake (the watch by the dead body) someone spills whiskey on
him. The theme of death and resurrection, of cycles of change coming
round in the course of history, is central to Finnegans Wake,
which derives one of its main principles of organization from the
cyclical theory of history put forward in 1725 by the Italian
philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico held that history passes through
four phases: the divine or theocratic, when people are governed by
their awe of the supernatural; the aristocratic (the "heroic age"
reflected in Homer and in Beowulf);
the democratic and individualistic; and the final stage of chaos, a
fall in into confusion startles humanity back into supernatural
reverence and starts the process once again. Joyce, like Yeats, saw his
own generation as the final stage awaiting the shock that will bring
humans back to the first.
A mere account of the narrative line of Finnegans Wake
cannot, of course, give any idea of the content of the work. If one
explains that it opens with Finnegan's fall, then introduces his
successor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is Everyman, and whose dream
constitutes the novel, that he is presented as having guilt feelings
about an indecency he committed (or may have committed) at Phoenix
Park, Dublin; that his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP (who is also
Eve, Iseult, Ireland, the river Liffey), changes her role just as he
does; that he has two sons, Shem and Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin), who
represent introvert and extrovert, artist and practical man, creator
and popularizer, and symbolize this basic dichotomy in human nature by
all kinds of metamorphoses; and if one adds that, in the four books
into which Finnegans Wake is
divided (after Vico's pattern), actions comic or grotesque or sad or
tender or desperate or passionate or terribly ordinary (and very often
several of these things at the same time) take place with all the
shifting meanings of a dream, so that characters change into others or
into inanimate objects and the setting keeps shifting—if we explain all
this, we still have said very little about what makes Finnegans Wake
what it is. The dreamer, whose initials HCE indicate his universality
("Here Comes Everybody"), is at the same time a particular person, who
keeps a pub at Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb on the river Liffey near
Phoenix Park. His mysterious misdemeanor in Phoenix Park is in a sense
Original Sin: Earwicker is Adam as well as a primeval giant, the Hill
of Howth, the Great Parent ("Haveth Childers Everywhere" is another
expansion of HCE), and Man in History. Other characters who flit and
change through the book, such as the Twelve Customers (who are also
twelve jurymen and public opinion) and the Four Old Men (who are also
judges, the authors of the four Gospels, and the four elements), help
weave the texture of multiple significance so characteristic of the
work. But always it is the punning language, extending significance
downward—rather than the plot, developing it lengthwise—that bears the
main load of meaning.
