Languages of Truth Read online

  Languages of Truth is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2021 by Salman Rushdie

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape, a division of Penguin Random House UK, London, and in Canada by Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada, Toronto.

  The essays and speeches in this work originally appeared in different form and most pieces have been previously published. A source list can be found on page 353.

  “I Am Not Yet Dead” from the musical Monty Python’s Spamalot, written by Eric Idle, music by John Du Prez. Copyright © 2004. Used with permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rushdie, Salman, author. Title: Languages of truth: essays 2003-2020 / Salman Rushdie. Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2021] Identifiers: LCCN 2020028493 (print) | LCCN 2020028494 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593133170 (hardback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593133187 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PR6068.U757 L36 2021 (print) | LCC PR6068.U757 (ebook) | DDC 824/.914—dc23 LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020028493 LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020028494

  International edition ISBN 9780593243220

  Ebook ISBN 9780593133187

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Lucas Heinrich

  Cover illustrations (top to bottom): Hanuman before Rama and Lakshmana, c. 1710–25 (Metropolitan Museum, N.Y.); photograph of Amrita Sher-Gil, 1936; G. A. Harker, Don Quixote fighting windmills, from Don Quixote: Written Anew for Young People, 1910; Kara Walker, The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, 2013 (© Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers)

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Wonder Tales

  Proteus

  Heraclitus

  Another Writer’s Beginnings

  Part Two

  Philip Roth

  Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five

  Samuel Beckett’s Novels

  Cervantes and Shakespeare

  Gabo and I

  Harold Pinter (1930–2008)

  Introduction to The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV

  Autobiography and the Novel

  Adaptation

  Notes on Sloth: From Saligia to Oblomov

  Hans Christian Andersen

  King of the World by David Remnick

  Very Well Then I Contradict Myself

  Part Three

  Truth

  Courage

  Texts for PEN

  1. The Pen and the Sword

  2. The Birth of PEN World Voices

  3. The Arthur Miller Lecture, 2012

  4. PEN World Voices Opening Night 2014

  5. PEN World Voices Opening Night 2017

  Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011)

  The Liberty Instinct

  Osama Bin Laden

  Ai Weiwei and Others: The 2011 Crackdown in China

  The Half-Woman God

  Nova Southeastern University Commencement Address, 2006

  Emory University Commencement Address, 2015

  Part Four

  The Composite Artist: The Emperor Akbar and the Making of the Hamzanama

  Amrita Sher-Gil: Letters

  Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003)

  Being Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits, Gagosian Gallery, London, 2005

  Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Whitney Museum, New York, 2007

  Kara Walker at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2009

  Sebastião Salgado

  The Unbeliever’s Christmas

  Carrie Fisher

  Pandemic: A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus

  The Proust Questionnaire: Vanity Fair

  Dedication

  About These Texts

  By Salman Rushdie

  About the Author

  WONDER TALES

  1

  Before there were books, there were stories. At first the stories weren’t written down. Sometimes they were even sung. Children were born, and before they could speak, their parents sang them songs, a song about an egg that fell off a wall, perhaps, or about a boy and a girl who went up a hill and fell down it. As the children grew older, they asked for stories almost as often as they asked for food. Now there was a goose that laid golden eggs, or a boy who sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans, or a naughty rabbit trespassing on a dangerous farmer’s land. The children fell in love with these stories and wanted to hear them over and over again. Then they grew older and found those stories in books. And other stories that they had never heard before, about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, or a silly old bear and an easily scared piglet and a gloomy donkey, or a phantom tollbooth, or a place where wild things were. They heard and read stories and they fell in love with them, Mickey in the night kitchen with magic bakers who all looked like Oliver Hardy, and Peter Pan, who thought death would be an awfully big adventure, and Bilbo Baggins under a mountain winning a riddle contest against a strange creature who had lost his precious, and the act of falling in love with stories awakened something in the children that would nourish them all their lives: their imagination.

  The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly the stories fell away from them, the stories were packed away in boxes in the attic, and it became harder for the former children to tell and receive stories, harder for them, sadly, to fall in love. For some of them, stories began to seem irrelevant, unnecessary: kids’ stuff. These were sad people, and we must pity them and try not to think of them as stupid boring philistine losers.

  I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. As adults, falling in love less easily, we may end up with only a handful of books that we can truly say we love. Maybe this is why we make so many bad judgments.

  Nor is this love unconditional or eternal. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song. When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass’s great novel The Tin Drum, I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for
fully ten years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.

  I grew up in Bombay, India, a city that is no longer, today, at all like the city it once was and has even changed its name to the much less euphonious Mumbai, in a time so unlike the present that it feels impossibly remote, even fantastic: a real-life version of the mythic golden age. Childhood, as A. E. Housman reminds us in “The Land of Lost Content,” often also called “Blue Remembered Hills,” is the country to which we all once belonged and will all eventually lose:

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  In that far-off Bombay, the stories and books that reached me from the West seemed like true tales of wonder. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” with its splinters of magic mirror that entered people’s bloodstreams and turned their hearts to ice, was even more terrifying to a boy from the tropics, where the only ice was in the refrigerator. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” felt especially enjoyable to a boy growing up in the immediate aftermath of the British Empire. And there was Huckleberry Finn, irresistible to a Bombay boy because of its hero’s extraordinary freedom of action, though I was puzzled about why, if the runaway slave Jim was trying to escape the world of slavery and get to the non-slave-owning North, did he get onto a raft on the Mississippi, which flows south?

  Perhaps tales of elsewhere always feel like fairy tales, and certainly it is one of the great wonders of literature that it opens up many “elsewheres” to us, from the Little Mermaid’s underwater world to Dorothy’s Oz, and makes them ours. But for me, the real wonder tales were closer to home, and I have always thought it my great good fortune as a writer to have grown up steeped in them.

  Some of these stories were sacred in origin, but because I grew up in a nonreligious household, I was able to receive them simply as beautiful stories. This did not mean I did not believe them. When I heard about the samudra manthan, the tale of how the great god Indra churned the Milky Way, using the fabled Mount Mandara as his churning stick, to force the giant ocean of milk in the sky to give up its nectar, amrita, the nectar of immortality, I began to see the stars in a new way. In that impossibly ancient time, my childhood, a time before light pollution made most of the stars invisible to city dwellers, a boy in a garden in Bombay could still look up at the night sky and hear the music of the spheres and see with humble joy the thick stripe of the galaxy there. I imagined it dripping with magic nectar. Maybe if I opened my mouth, a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal too.

  This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.

  We were not Hindus, my family, but we believed the great stories of Hinduism to be available to us also. On the day of the annual Ganpati festival, when huge crowds carried effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh to the water’s edge at Chowpatty Beach to immerse the god in the sea, Ganesh felt as if he belonged to me too; he felt like a symbol of the collective joy and, yes, unity of the city rather than a member of the pantheon of a “rival” faith. When I learned that Ganesh’s love of literature was so great that he sat at the feet of India’s Homer, the sage Vyasa, and became the scribe who wrote down the great Mahabharata epic, he belonged to me even more deeply; and when I grew up and wrote a novel about a boy called Saleem with an unusually big nose, it seemed natural, even though Saleem came from a Muslim family, to associate the narrator of Midnight’s Children with the most literary of gods, who just happened to have a big trunk of a nose as well. The blurring of boundaries between religious cultures in that old, truly secularist Bombay now feels like one more thing that divides the past from India’s bitter, stifled, censorious, sectarian present.

  The Mahabharata and its sidekick, the Ramayana, two of the longest wonder tales of all, are still alive in India, alive in the minds of Indians and relevant to their daily lives, in the way the gods of the Greeks and Romans were once alive in Western imaginations. Once, and not so long ago, it was possible in the lands of the West to allude to the story of the shirt of Nessus, and people would have known that the dying centaur Nessus tricked Deianira, the wife of Heracles or Hercules, into giving her husband his shirt, knowing it was poisoned and would kill him. Once, everyone knew that after the death of Orpheus, greatest of poets and singers, his severed head continued to sing. These images and many others were available, as metaphors, to help people understand the world. Art does not die when the artist dies, said Orpheus’s head. The song survives the singer. And the shirt of Nessus warned us that even a very special gift may be dangerous. Another such gift, of course, was the Trojan horse, which taught us all to fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts. Some metaphors of the wonder tales of the West have managed to survive.

  But in India, as I grew up, the wonder tales all lived, and they still do. Nowadays it isn’t even necessary to read the full Ramayana or Mahabharata; some may be grateful for this news, because the Mahabharata is the longest poem in world literature, over two hundred thousand lines long, which is to say ten times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey put together, while the Ramayana runs to around fifty thousand lines, merely two and a half times as long as the combined works of Homer. Fortunately for younger readers, the immensely popular comic-book series Amar Chitra Katha, “immortal picture stories,” offers adept renderings of tales from both. And for adults, a ninety-four-episode TV version of the Mahabharata brought the nation to a stop each week when originally screened in the 1990s and found an audience numbering in the hundreds of millions.

  It has to be admitted that the influence of these tales is not always positive. The sectarian politics of the Hindu nationalist parties like the BJP uses the rhetoric of the past to fantasize about a return to “Ram Rajya,” the “reign of Lord Ram,” a supposed golden age of Hinduism without such inconveniences as members of other religions to complicate matters. The politicization of the Ramayana, and of Hinduism in general, has become, in the hands of unscrupulous sectarian leaders, a dangerous affair. The attack on the book The Hindus—a work of consummate scholarship written by one of the world’s greatest Sanskritists, Wendy Doniger—and the regrettable decision of Penguin India to withdraw and pulp copies of it in response to fundamentalist criticism, is a sharp illustration of that fact.

  Problems can extend beyond politics too. In some later versions of the Ramayana, the exiled Lord Ram and his brother Lakshman leave Sita alone in their forest dwelling one day while they hunt a golden deer, not knowing that the deer is actually a rakshasa, a kind of demon, in disguise. To protect Sita in their absence, Lakshman draws a rekha, or an enchanted line, around their home; anyone who tries to cross it except Ram, Lakshman, and Sita will be burned to death by flames that erupt from the line. But the demon king Ravana disguises himself as a beggar and comes to Sita’s door asking for alms, and she crosses the line to give him what he wants. This is how he captures her and spirits her away to his kingdom of Lanka, after which Ram and Lakshman have to fight a war to get her back. To “cross the Lakshman rekha” has become a metaphor for overstepping the boundaries of what is permissible or right, of going too far, of succumbing foolishly to iconoclasm, and bringing down upon yourself dire consequences.

  A few years ago in Delhi, there occurred the now notorious a
ssault and gang rape of a twenty-three-year-old student, who afterward died from her horrific injuries. Within days of this awful event, a state minister remarked that if the young woman concerned had not “crossed the Lakshman rekha”—in other words, taken a bus with a male friend in the evening instead of staying demurely at home—she would not have been attacked. He later withdrew the remark because of a public outcry, but his use of the metaphor revealed that too many men in India still believe that there are limits and boundaries women should not transgress. It should be said that in most traditional versions of the Ramayana, including the original version by the poet Valmiki, the story of the Lakshman rekha is not to be found. However, an apocryphal wonder tale can sometimes be as potent as a canonical one.

  I want to return, however, to that childhood self, enchanted by tales whose express and sole purpose was enchantment. I want to move away from the grand religious epics to the great hoard of scurrilous, conniving, mysterious, exciting, comic, bizarre, surreal, and very often extremely sexy narratives contained in the rest of the Eastern storehouse, because—not only because, but, yes, because—they show how much pleasure is to be gained from literature once God is removed from the picture. One of the most remarkable characteristics of the stories now gathered in the pages of The Thousand Nights and One Night, to take just one example, is the almost complete absence of religion. Lots of sex, much mischief, a great deal of deviousness; monsters, jinnis, giant rocs; at times, enormous quantities of blood and gore; but no God. This is why censorious Islamists dislike it so much.