Rushdie: Out of Hiding, Yearning for Anonymity
“To live in a day when your books can be quite famous and you can remain completely anonymous seems to me incredibly enviable,” Salman Rushdie was saying before a standing-room-only audience in Irvine Auditorium last February. “Now, it’s too often the other way ’round. People get to know the names of writers without really feeling the need to read their books.”
The Penn students and staff in attendance—many of whom won seats in a ticket lottery or begged for extra passes on the University’s electronic news groups—may or may not have read Rushdie’s work, but the demand for tickets to the lecture (which was hosted by Connaissance, the Provost’s Spotlight Series, and the Philomathean Society) was proof that the Indian-born Rushdie is anything but anonymous.
As a consequence of public interest in his private life, he is repeatedly asked whether his novels are autobiographical. “The wrong answer to the question,” he explained, “is to say, ‘Well, you take little bits from life, and you change them around, and patch them together, and you can make up a fictional person,’” thereby admitting that a novel is only partly autobiographical. “But having the narrative untrue is the wrong answer; it’s not the answer anybody wants.”
Rushdie’s half-serious advice for young authors is simply to say that every novel is completely autobiographical. “If you can say that with a straight face,” he added, “the journalist will look at you oddly and ask the next question. Nothing else works, let me tell you.”
Other people are determined to be characters in books as well —a phenomenon Rushdie observed on a trip to India taken shortly after the publication of Midnight’s Children.
“One woman, a wonderfully grand, swanky, very coiffured, bejeweled Indian lady came up to me and kind of slapped me on the forearm, playfully,” Rushdie related. “She said, ‘Naughty boy! But it’s OK, I can see you had to do it.’” In his confusion, he replied, “Dear lady, who are you?” Rushdie was unable to dissuade her from the belief that she was a major character in Midnight’s Children.
Rushdie admitted to having had “a very bad start” as a writer. His first published novel, Grimus, sold under 900 copies. The first critical reviews of his work were terrible: “One critic came to me and suggested, ‘You obviously should find a different form of employment. Soon.’”
The turning point came with Midnight’s Children, published in 1981. “I’d always had the desire to write a novel that had to do with childhood, not just with childhood but with the particular childhood moment in which I grew up in Bombay in the fifties and sixties,” he said. Midnight’s Children became “a great story of the generation of independence—that was my generation—which crystallized into the stories of the children born in the first hour after the independence of the country.”
Turning to his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, Rushdie said that in all the “hoo-hah” surrounding the book, including the deadly protests put on by militant Islamic groups around the world, “what was obscured was that, fundamentally, it is not a novel about religion; it’s a novel about migration.
“The roots of self, the roots of fictional character, have always had a lot to do with the places people would live in, the communities that surround them, and the language that they speak,” he added. “The act of migration characteristically tears up every single one of those roots.” One consequence of mass migration is that novels can no longer presume a shared reality or shared customs between author and reader.
As for former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a death warrant on Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie said, “I invite you to notice which one of us is still alive.”
—Sarah Blackman C’03
