_________________________________________________________________ More on Rushdie (wasn't this Moor month?) _________________________________________________________________ * To: Multiple recipients of list SASIALIT * Subject: More on Rushdie (wasn't this Moor month?) * From: Subir Grewal * Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 20:52:53 -0400 * Reply-To: Joined Trill * Sender: SASIALIT -- Literature of South Asia and the Indian diaspora _________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- And now, a few comments on julian samuel's artcile on Rushdie. The suggestion is that Rushdie has used Islam and the western perception of Islam as an "easy target" upon which to build Satanic Verses' allure for the west. We can of course speak of how the denounciation of the Ayatollah is an attempt to forget the not too distant acts of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, but this is perhaps so obvious as to merit no mention. That Rushdie would have planned the entire fatwa episode and counted on it to ensure the popularity and success of Satanic Verses is absurd. That he included the infamous chapters knowingly is almost certain, but I doubt they was calculated to evince the response they did. Samuel suggests that Rushdie is knowingly controversial because he is aware of the sympathy this will evoke from the west, Samuel tells us this is at once a "moral good" (in that it is "a parody of religion in all its evil forms") and something too easy to stoop to. The question is not about religion and whether or not Rushdie's "parody" is a "moral good", but rather one of the imaginative project. There is no need of an "end", the arabesques themselves are what the work IS. Nor is there any pressing need to place the book within a discourse about colonialism. The political is only one facet of Rushdie's work, but here of course we are dealing with a critic concerned with the ease with which Rushdie has slipped into the "soft folds" of a Fabian inteligentsia and the glory of a "classless" narrative. Now on to Rushdie's influences. I see little that tells me Rushdie echoes Joyce (and which Joyce?). Marquez of course has become the poster boy for the entire Spanish fabulist mode. I doubt any reasonable assessment of Rushdie's influences can fail to include (perhaps beginning from the beginning), Cervantes, Borges, Cortazar, Fuentes. Marquez alone simply will not do. And if we are to look at the profound influence the Spanish canon has had on Rushdie we must look at the European (placing Latin America and Spain outside of Europe, with Russia in nowhere-land) "roots" of the canonical fabulists, now we must include Dante, Carroll, Vernes and Kafka. Rushdie himself claims Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, Machado de Assis. Maybe the salve for the agony of influence is to have too many influences. Undoubtedly I have left out writers who should belong here. But to come back to the issue of Spanish literature (and now the Moor's relation to everything Spanish), one that is pertinent here, we must also remember the shadow of the inquisition. If anything it is the inquisition that should be counted as an influence, and the political repression in South America. I think it best not to comment on the issue of Rushdie writing from the safe haven of Britain, while other authors die. The thought and fear of being burnt at the stake is never pleasant, even if the inquisition never really catches you. The status of heresy, it now appears, is not what Samuel claims it is. On the contrary, heresy still carries disasterous consequences, and the claim that western readers will digest anything just as long as it is heretic, abusive (especially when directed towards the 'outside') and placatory is to be doubted. Heresy is generally brilliant. "A look at Hindu mythology confirms that the sin of Onan is logically flawed for Brahma created the universe from his seed, and was therefore the first masturbator and the first creator. He seeded the ground, the mandrake and the humunculus." The richness of religious myth and the history of heresy is obviously irresistable, and only someone wearing blinders, searching for "ends" in fiction would suggest that it is futile to play with powerful myths because it has been done before, has it been done this way though? There is nothing that is "off-limits" for a writer; and in the case of SV and most notably Terra Nostra (my copy was stolen today) the very fact that religion is surrounded by an aura is what draws the author. Rushdie's relation to religion can hardly be equivalent to Joyce's, which is why there is no "meditation on religion", religious myth is simply another log for Rushdie's fire, perhaps just a little more significant because it can burn him too. Perhaps Rushdie has nothing "important" or even "novel" to say about religion, but it' how he says it that counts, what metaphor, what allusion, what response. To finish, Rushdie is to be read for the imaginativeness in his prose, true this includes the political sphere, but is not subsumed by it. PS. Still to read Satanic Verses. Perhaps someday ;~) hostmaster@trill-home.com * Symbiant test coaching * Blue-Ribbon * Lynx 2.5 A fool must now and then be right by chance. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Key Escrow = Conscription for the masses | 2048 bit via finger iQB1AwUBMauf8BwDKqi8Iu65AQGPiQL+JJ4zmsswWs9qGoyvx22RZXgAVJfTRAKZ 9C+zoA8lL/xSTo/8AvKEHWvkBQQOUoF3JPSllJ7NB8XFpSi/ix2qivde8qJNz3/L 8Isekho0KUN3cgX1SxkmROl1EDvLueKx =zKXG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----