HEADLINES KEPT GETTING in the way. In Pakistan, reactionary nuts are using Salman Rushdie, and the dead bodies of some true believers, to destabilize Benazir Bhutto’s government. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, with Rocks in his Dome, has put out a $5.2-million contract hit on the novelist. In South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and at Waldenbooks, The Satanic Verses is banned. For a couple of minutes, let’s try to see the book through the bonfires of its burning.
As much as Islam, Salman Rushdie blasphemes Thatcherism. He’s unkind, too, to V. S. Naipaul. “Pitting levity against gravity,” altogether impious The Satanic Verses is one of those go-for-broke “metafictions,” a grand narrative and Monty Python send-up of history, religion, and popular culture; Hindu cyclic and Muslim dualistic; postcolonial identity crisis and modernist pastiche; Bombay bombast and stiff-upper-liposuction; babu babytalk and ad agency neologism; cinema gossip, elephant masks, pop jingles, lousy puns, kinky sex, and schadenfreude; a sort of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City—from which this slyboots Author-God tip-and-twinkletoes away, with a cannibal grin. “Who am I?” he asks us. “Let’s put it this way: Who has the best tunes?”
The Satanic Verses lacks the ravening power, the great gulp, of Midnight’s Children and Shame. It bites off the heads of its characters instead of digesting their essences. It’s got too much on its troubled mind to make a symphonic noise out of so many discords. Of course, in its huge dishevelment, its Leaves of Grass lurchings and scourges, whistles and vapors, belly laughs and belly flops, it’s infinitely more interesting than those hundreds of neat little novels we have to read between Rushdies.
What Modernism, the new alchemy, is all about is the inventing of a new self. But what if the machinery short-circuits? Is there a way out of these devolving cycles into lesser selves, meaner societies, deathward-spinning meta-systems? One suggestion, though I’m not sure how seriously Rushdie intends it, shows up in a book by Zeeny Vakil, Saladin Chamcha’s Bombay art critic/girlfriend (the most interesting, least developed charac-ter in the novel): The Only Good Indian lambastes “the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?” It’s Zeeny who tells Chamcha to get real: “We’re right in front of you. You should try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick.”
But this seems far too straightforward for a metafiction. I think Rushdie’s also proposing something more botanical. When, in Gibreel Farishta’s dream of Mecca and drowning, the Titlipur villagers leave their mothering banyan tree, they perish. Then there is, for Chamcha, “the tree of his own life,” the walnut tree his father planted “with his own hands on the day of the coming of the son.” Chamcha explains this tree to Zeeny: “Your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it’s a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don’t you think?” As usual, Chamcha has missed the point. For his father, that tree was where his son’s soul lived while the boy himself was far away, pursuing his unrequited love affair with England. Many pages later, Chamcha will watch a television program on gardening, and witness what’s called a “chimeran graft,” in which two trees—mulberry? laburnum? broom?—are bred into one:
a chimera without roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree… capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies—the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonization of the planet—he was given this one gift.
For this, they want to kill him.
The Hit Men
I hope hundreds turned out yesterday at the PEN rally to support Salman Rushdie. We need something to wash the taste of gall and aspirin out of our mouths. It’s been a disgraceful week. A maniac puts out a $5.2-million contract on one of the best writers in the English language, and how does the civilized West respond? France and Germany won’t publish The Satanic Verses; Canada won’t sell it; Waldenbooks and B. Dalton abandon ship and the First Amendment; and a brave new philistinism struts its stuff all over Mediapolis, USA, telling us that that Rushdie’s unreadable anyway, besides being some sort of left-wing Indian troublemaker you never heard of till the Ayatollah gave him a bad review. And nobody seems in fact to have read any Rushdie—certainly not Cardinal O’Connor, nor Jimmy Breslin, nor Pat Buchanan.
In his first novel, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie suggested that independence for the Indian subcontinent was ruined by the lunatic behavior of Muslims and Hindus. He also made fun of Indira Gandhi. And Indira Gandhi threatened to sue. His second novel, Shame, was a savage attack on the bloody coming to power in Pakistan of the Islamic fundamentalist Zia. Pakistan banned it. The Satanic Verses is likewise contemporary. Among other things, it’s a Monty Python send-up of modern England, its money-grubbing and its racism. Maggie Thatcher’s more of a target than Mohammed. And so is the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, in thin disguise. Just maybe, the blood-grudge of His Bearded Malevolence is personal. He’d surely have seen himself in Rushdie’s portrait of the Imam. This Imam, in angry exile in the modern era in one of Europe’s imperial cities, plots the overthrow of a Mideast state run by a Western-educated, secular-minded empress whom the Imam accuses of “sexual relations with lizards,” and whom he confuses with the hated Mother-Goddess Al-Lat. He sounds like Tehran radio. Just listen to him: “History is the blood wine that must no longer be drunk. History, the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil… the greatest of the lies—progress, science, rights—against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Allah finished his revelation to Mahound.” And: “Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word.” And, after a revolution exactly like K.’s in Iran: “Now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of the exile’s return, of the victory of water over wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.”
But all this has been ignored, like the fact that fundamentalist Pakistanis would be rioting to get rid of Benazir Bhutto, a Western-educated woman, whether or not Rushdie had ever written a word. And religious fanatics are killing one another’s children in Belfast and Beirut without the excuse of a novel to hate.
You may recall that “assassin” derives from the Arabic hashishi (“hashish eaters”). The original assassins were an eleventh-century all-male Persian sect, fanning out from the Alamout mountain in northern Iran. They killed on command of Hassan Ibn Sabbah. What we’ve looked into for the past shameful week is an eleventh-century mind, an assassin’s grin. We’ve averted our jumpy eyes, ducked our fuzzy heads, scuttled on all fours. Welcome to the Untime of the Imam.
On Thursday in England Roald Dahl, an author of wicked children’s books, told TV cameras that Rushdie’s novel should be pulped “to save lives”—as if the novel had killed anybody. On Friday, pulling The Satanic Verses from his shelves, B. Dalton CEO Leonard Riggio explained: “It is regrettable that a foreign government has been able to hold hostage our most sacred First Amendment”—as if Riggio weren’t the hostage holder. (You’d think maybe the FBI might be interested in terrorist threats to bookstores and publishing houses, but not according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.) On Saturday in the New York Post, Pat Buchanan enjoyed himself at the expense of “the trendy leftist” Rushdie, suggested that he seek sanctuary among Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to whom he’s been so sympathetic, and allowed as how “the First Amendment has succeeded phony patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel”—as if that amendment, the glory of our republic, weren’t precisely what protects the right of a Buchanan to his swamp fevers, the privilege of such pips to squeak.
And on Sunday in Newsday, Breslin, whom the vapors must have taken as they sometimes seize a Mailer, described Rushdie as “a horrid writer” whose “cheap apology” to Khomeini was “a wretched performance,” a “groveling… perfectly consistent with Rushdie’s dreadful sentence structure”—as if all the newspaper columnists in America could write for a thousand years, even unto the end of Untime, and ever produce a novel half as wonderful as Midnight’s Children.
Monday we were told that Cardinal O’Connor would really rather we didn’t buy the Rushdie book. We were also told that the cardinal himself won’t read it. And where were the other world religious leaders? Not a single one seems to have spoken up on Rushdie’s behalf. They may have deplored the Ayatollah’s fatwa, but they spent more time sympathizing with the injured feelings of the Islamic multitude; and most thought the book should never have been published; and many in England agitated to expand the blasphemy laws. If the Vatican’s performance was disgraceful, so was that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, the Cardinal of Paris, the Archbishop of Lyon, and Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Avraham Shapira. It’s as if all of them overnight forgot about Erasmus and Spinoza, Jan Hus and Thomas More, Galileo and Martin Luther, not to mention Socrates and not even to think about Jesus Christ: free speech on the cross.
As Rushdie himself explains, right at the start of Verses, when Chamcha and Gibreel are blown out of the sky by terrorists: “Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves….”