The Victory of Salman Rushdie
The Next Nobel Prize?
Do the surreal and the absurd offer the most accurate portrayals of real life today? Has the boundary between objectivity and invention been abolished? Salman Rushdie’s storytelling merges our outer and inner worlds until we are not sure anymore if there is a separation between the two. Dreams pour into the realm of consciousness through the cracks of our perception. Having receded from centre stage, the gods in his fiction have stopped interfering with human affairs. And yet, while Rushdie’s protagonists have to come to grips with their newly acquired liberties, supernatural events continue to proliferate. In Victory City, his latest novel, a whole empire is created through the divine powers of a single woman. Thanks to her gifts illusion transforms human life into an extraordinary adventure. We witness miraculous seeds building a city from scratch, out of nothing, in a celebration of joy. But golden ages are never meant to last very long. The fact that the female protagonist, after achieving her most ambitious goals, has her eyes put out by hot iron rods as a punishment inflicted by one of her foes, carries some sinister prophetic implications. Unfortunately, something atrocious has happened in real life too to demonstrate that fictions can be dangerous and predict the future in roundabout ways. The osmosis between fact and fantasy blurring into each other has recently culminated in a tragic epilogue.
On 12 August 2022 Salman Rushdie nearly died but luckily didn’t. In an attack that came within millimetres of killing him, he was stabbed a dozen times by a deranged assailant during a speaking engagement at the Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York State. It goes without saying that the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini against the writer demonstrated once again that fanaticism doesn’t necessarily always have God on its side. Journalist David Remnick, who’s interviewed Rushdie for The New Yorker, suggests that Khomeini’s calling for Rushdie’s execution had been a sign of weakness rather than of strength. The popularity of Iran’s revolutionary regime was already declining by then. Khomeini, who by the way had never read Rushdie’s supposedly blasphemous Satanic Verses, simply tried to seize the opportunity to reverse the tide of his strategic predicament. After years of war with Iraq he had just been forced to accept a ceasefire with Saddam Hussein, a humiliating compromise. Salman Rushdie was forced to go into hiding, guarded by the UK secret services. How did it feel to know he had been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini? How did it feel to live without a home, like a complete unknown? He did not back down. He refused to become a creature of the fatwa. He didn’t want it to become a reason to write vindictive books. In Rushdie’s lexicon V stands for Victory, not Vendetta. From that moment onwards he would write in favour of the freedom of imagination, freedom from fear and freedom from the view that people could be killed for their own ideas. His mission would be to bring joy, in spite of everything. And he was right on the money. One day historians will look upon our current age. The order to assassinate Rushdie — and his subsequent stabbing — will be declared as one of the most barbaric rulings ever issued by a political regime.
Elvis Presley freed our body, Bob Dylan freed our mind: if what Bruce Springsteen once famously said about them is true, then we might add that Salman Rushdie teaches us how to fly inside our mind. He opens the universe for us, outside time and space as we commonly envisage these concepts. Not much is really sacred in Rushdie’s parallel universes. There you have the chance to meet the god of cholera, the god of polenta, the god of toilet and the god of garbage. There you can find a myriad of implicit or explicit references to Bob Dylan lyrics. Why is Rushdie spelling absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco’s surname as Jonesco — with an initial “J” instead of an “I” — in the same line where he’s conjuring a character called Mr Jones? Is it because Rushdie is trying to tell us that Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” with its absurdist tones, featuring a disoriented Mr Jones as the song’s protagonist, is a nod to Eugene Ionesco? Dylan and Rushdie would certainly agree that nothing beats the surreal if we try to describe this junk culture we’re living in, its withdrawal from common sense while the laws of science melt into mumbo-jumbo, while we accept incredible absurdities in the midst of the everyday and our grasp of reality simply deteriorates. Rushdie has called it the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, because this is what happens when you cross the frontier between fact and fiction. In the wake of the attempt at his life Rushdie revealed to David Remnick that a follow-up to his 2012 first memoir written in the third person, in which he had adopted his fatwa-era code name of Joseph Anton, might be possible but that distanced approach seems now to be wrong for the task. “This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” he said. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.” Having suffered multiple injuries and having lost the sight in his right eye as a consequence, Rushdie may well be entitled to write an “eye” story after all, by looking into justice’s face and seeing where “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” may lead us. In his next memoir, if he ever decided to do it, Salman Rushdie said he would like to be less panoramic in his writing and try to focus on the “microscopic”, on a narrow place to make it universal. Bob Dylan taught us it is possible to see the world in a grain of sand. Rushdie can certainly do it too, and this is our hope as his devoted readers.
