Salman Rushdie's "Knife": Conjoined contradictions

For decades, Salman Rushdie has resisted allowing enemies to define him. The Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa declaring that Rushdie should be assassinated after publishing The Satanic Verses sent the author into hiding, but for more than 20 years Rushdie has lived openly and peacefully in New York, aware of the lingering threat but not constrained by it--until August 2022, when a would-be assassin stabbed Rushdie fifteen times with a knife before an auditorium full of onlookers in Chautauqua, New York. 

If his life is a book, writes Rushdie, "The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn't ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on." 

Going on is exactly what Rushdie is trying to do in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He had hoped to return to writing fiction, but he found that he could not write anything else until he wrote about the attack: "To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art."

Knife is divided into two sections, The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life, and the book immerses readers in both the horrors of violence and the healing power of love, along with other linked contradictions exposed by Rushdie's experience. For instance, Rushdie praises the onlookers who rushed to his aid after the attack:

I didn't see their faces and I don't know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason...and we also contain the antidote to that disease--courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

This horde of people devoted to his safety multiplies as he enters first a hospital and then a rehab facility, where he endures the humiliations of losing autonomy and agency over his privacy, his career, and, of course, his body:

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body--to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness--so that you can live.

But even as he is dependent upon a hovering host of health-care workers, he finds that "When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness."

That loneliness leaves time for the author to mull over his peculiar relationship with his attacker, whom Rushdie never names but instead refers to as The A. In the twenty-seven seconds it took The A to stab Rushdie (in his eye, neck, chest, and hand), attacker and victim existed within what Rushdie calls "a profound conjoining." In an imaginary interview, Rushdie tells his attacker, "You put on the mantle of Death itself, and I was Life." Rushdie thinks of his attacker as a failure, a nothing, a hapless clown, but this haplessness is an advantage; one of Rushdie's doctors tells him, "You're lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

But there are many types of knives. The A's knife may have severed the author from his world, but Rushdie refuses the role of victimhood, instead wielding his own weapons:

Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

He does this best while describing the attack and his long journey toward recovery as well as the role of his family and friends in carrying him through this journey. Despite the inciting act of senseless violence, Rushdie considers his story one in which "hatred--the knife as a metaphor for hate--is answered, and finally overcome, by love." In the end he travels back to the scene of the attack to convey an important message to his absent attacker--and anyone who might sympathize with the attempt to use violence to silence stories: "We're back, and after our encounter with hatred, we're celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life."

Joseph Anton and the storyteller's art

Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir of the fatwa years, is one of those rare books whose vices and virtues are identical. It's long and gossipy, full of shameless name-dropping and self-righteous defensiveness; Rushdie exposes his own fears and foibles but also shines a harsh but sometimes humorous spotlight on the inadequacies of others. For those reasons alone it's well worth reading, but I cherish those moments when the book offers a peek at the writer's imagination at work.

Soon after the fatwa required Rushdie to go into hiding, he began writing a book for his young son, Zafar: "He had told Zafar stories while the boy took his evening bath, bath-time stories instead of bedtime ones. There were little sandalwood animals and shikara boats from Kashmir floating in the bathwater and the sea of stories was born there, or perhaps reborn." From this bath-time ritual grew Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an enchanting tale of the power of storytelling.

He recalls experiencing this power on a visit to Kerala, where an oral storyteller broke all the rules of conventional narrative: "The storyteller stirred stories into one another, digressed frequently from the main narrative, told jokes, sang songs, connected his political story to the ancient tales, made personal asides, and generally misbehaved," but the audience did not "hiss or boo or throw vegetables" (or draw guns or throw bombs or declare death sentences). Rushdie wonders why the audience remained enraptured by the storyteller's unconventional art--"Did it do so in spite of the storyteller's complicated story-juggling act, or because of it?" 

I want to share this question with my postcolonial survey students, who have just begun reading Shame and wonder why Rushdie didn't arrange his story in strict chronological order but instead allows different times and places to intermingle promiscuously. Rushdie describes his earliest attempts to find the connection among the various "fragments of narratives and characters" that eventually assembled themselves not very neatly into The Satanic Verses, a book in which he realized that "his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his life," was not India or Pakistan or any particular place or time but "the great matter of how the world joined up, not only how the East flowed into the West and the West into the East, but how the past shaped the present while the present shaped our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, belief, leaked across the frontier that separated it from the everyday."

The everyday hassles of life in hiding consumed great swaths of the writer's time and imagination, requiring him sometimes to forsake fiction and master the alien language of political speech, which felt flat, ugly, colorless:

Did it matter if the writer was denuded in this way, stripped of the richness of language? Yes, it did, because beauty struck chords deep within the human heart, beauty opened doors in the spirit. Beauty mattered because beauty was joy and joy was the reason he did what he did, his joy in words and in using them to tell tales, to create worlds, to sing. And beauty, for now, was being treated as a luxury he should do without.

And beauty is only one of many luxuries he has to do without. The claustrophobic nature of his life in hiding comes through clearly in the book, but when the walls close in, he finds escape in writing. "Literature," he writes, "tried to open the universe, to increase, if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before."

And the audience sits enraptured and listens, despite the storyteller's juggling act--or perhaps because of it.

Of fire and fish

If you hear a voice sadly intoning "Magic is fading from the universe," can you guess what universe you are inhabiting? Middle Earth? Narnia? The slightly skewed version of England featured in Douglas Adams's The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul?

These days you could encounter that nostalgia for fading magic just about anywhere, so it's not surprising when it turns up on page 132 of Salman Rushdie's new novel, Luka and the Fire of Life. I've gone on record (here) proclaiming my devotion to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the 1991 novel that introduced the setting and many of the characters that reappear in Luka, so I'm sorry to report that much of the magic that so charmed me in Haroun is lacking from Luka.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories functioned admirably on two levels: as a child's adventure story and as a cautionary tale about the dangers of censorship. Published just two years after The Satanic Verses provoked the fatwa that sent Rushdie into hiding, Haroun engages readers in a crusade to protect the endangered Sea of Stories, and while the dangers feel real and urgent, the novel never loses its spirit of playfulness and joy.

Luka and the Fire of Life takes readers to another quadrant of the magical world created in Haroun and sets another child hero on a quest to save his father, his family, and his magical storytelling ability. As in Haroun, Rushdie sometimes exults in the sheer joy of language, such as in his description of the Sea of Wisdom:

Shining schools of little cannyfish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly colored smartipans, and the duller, deepwater shrewds. Flying low over the water's surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths...

Young Luka, though, drinks no great thirsty draughts from the Lake of Wisdom because he's already wise enough without it. He's far too knowing for a child, far too quick to uncover the secrets of this unknown world, and while he relies on some entertaining friends, they lack the depth of development and charm of the helper characters in Haroun.

For an inexperienced child, Luka makes an awful lot of smarty-pants speeches. For instance, facing the massed forces of all the forgotten fairies and demons and deities that ever appeared in myth or legend, he delivers a stem-winder:

Listen to me: it's only through Stories that you can get out into the Real World and have some sort of power again. When your story is well told, people believe in you; not in the way they used to believe, not in a worshiping way, but in the way people believe in stories--happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn't end. You want Immortality? It's only my father, and people like him, who can give it to you now...

He goes on like this for half a page of uninspired prose, and remarkably, it works. I guess Magic hasn't entirely faded from the universe!

What Luka doesn't mention in this speech is that his father's storytelling ability isn't the only source of Luka's power. He has learned the topography of the World of Magic by listening to his father's stories, but navigating that world and surviving its dangers requires a different sort of skill, the kind that can only be developed by spending hours on end playing Super Mario Brothers. Yes: Luka is a gamer, and his long hours with a joystick in his hand have uniquely equipped him to save the day. I won't explain how the World of Magic and the World of Mario overlap because it's just too silly, but every time Luka piles up a few spare lives or hits the "save" button, I'm reminded that the dangers here are far less urgent and believable than those in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Luka and the Fire of Life has its charming moments, but I don't feel the fire that sparked in the earlier novel or see the life that swirled in that Sea of Stories. If Magic is fading from the universe, I doubt that Super Mario Brothers is going to help.

Enchanting

I've finally finished Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which is both enchanting and infuriating. Rushdie creates an amazingly rich world blending history, fantasy, and myth, a world so enchanting that it is impossible to imagine an end, so it's inevitable that any ending would be disappointing, and Rushdie's is doubly so--a lush, baroque plot rushes suddenly to a lame, unsatisfying conclusion. That's the infuriating part.

But it is an amazing book. The novel explores the public hunger for myth, the sort of hunger that today inspires cable news networks to cast every petty newsmakers as epic hero or villain. Rushdie suggests that the human desire for myth functions just fine even when the only means of transmission is word of mouth: "Plainly Lady Black Eyes was becoming all things to all people, an exemplar, a lover, an antagonist, a muse; in her absence she was being used as one of those vessels into which human beings pour their own preferences, abhorrences, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, secrets, misgivings, and joys, their unrealized selves, their shadows, their innocence and guilt, their doubts and certainties, their most generous and also most grudging response to their passage through the world." Few know better than Rushdie that in order to become a vessel for the public's hopes and fears, one must first be reamed out, emptied, scoured, and possessed.

The idea of possession recurs throughout the book, with characters becoming possessed by hungers for passion, power, and poetry. The protagonist is a compulsive storyteller who "had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wonderous travelers' tales." Even when he finds himself in a dark dungeon slithering with vermin, his greatest fear is that he will die without telling his story: "He found this thought intolerable and so it refused to leave him, it crawled in and out of his ears, slid into the corners of his eyes and stuck to the roof of his mouth and to the soft tissue under his tongue."

While the ability to create a fluid universe of narrative eventually elevates the storyteller into a position of power (however temporary), other characters illustrate that narrative creativity is not the only way to win political favor. Sometimes success comes to those willing to disgorge the undigested contents of an excellent memory, those like Bakti Ram Jain, who "proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque formulations of excessive encomia could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing."

Such playful moments have been fleeting in Rushdie's recent novels, but The Enchantress of Florence bubbles over with delight in the intricacies of the English language and the follies of the human condition, as well as a wealth of playful allusions suggesting that Rushdie has drunk deeply from the Sea of Stories and served up a generous draught for his eager readers. I just wish it hadn't ended quite so quickly.

Bonus tidbit: "By the Caspian Sea the old potato witches sat down and wept," begins one chapter, but "When they heard the news of Ismail's rout, the eastern potato witches wiped their eyes, ceased their wailing, and danced. A pirouetting Khorasani witch is a rare and particular sight, and few who saw the dance ever forgot it." Those who teach on my campus are laughing uproariously right now, but others don't get the joke. Every campus ought to come equipped with a pirouetting Khorasani!

Everybody to the Time-Out Box!

The current furor over Salman Rushdie's knighthood again places The Satanic Verses in the spotlight, which is annoying because it may not be Rushdie's best work but it consistently overshadows other novels worthy of discussion. Who talks about Shame or The Ground Beneath Her Feet or even Midnight's Children? Despite his other accomplishments, in the popular consciousness Rushdie remains a man of one book.

I've never taught The Satanic Verses for several reasons: it's too long and requires too much background information for an undergraduate survey course, and the political furor tends to overshadow the text itself. It's like teaching Sylvia Plath's poetry: students get so caught up in the poet's biography that they can't focus on the poetry as poetry. Further, it is difficult to hold a reasonable discussion The Satanic Verses when any critique of the novel runs the risk of being interpreted as favoring the fatwa.

The whole discussion would simmer down a bit if everyone took a time-out to read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the next novel Rushdie published after The Satanic Verses and certainly his most joyful, though it begins in sadness:

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.

The source of the sadness is simple: the Sea of Stories is being polluted, silencing the old stories and preventing the creation of new ones. The parallel between this silencing and the fatwa is clear throughout the book, but the possibility of a political interpretation does not overshadow the wildly inventive pleasure of the prose. On the simplest level, the book is a children's adventure story with heroes and villains and even a captive princess unlike any other captive princess you've ever encountered, but it is also a profound exploration of the costs of silencing stories. Haroun looks into the Sea of Stories:

He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained differents sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

The Sea of Stories is inhabited by the aptly-named Plentimaw Fishes, whose many mouths constantly swallow streams of story:

...and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing . . . no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new.

Restoring the health of the Sea of Stories is Haroun's work and Rushdie's as well. His novels thrive on the kind of creative recombination that takes place in the Sea of Stories, drawing from all manner of texts (myths, fairy tales, sacred texts, literary works, news stories) to produce plots, characters, and images that are startlingly new. This, of course, is what caused all the trouble with The Satanic Verses: while no one objects to Rushdie's taking liberties with Omar Khayyam or the Sleeping Beauty myth in Shame, plenty of people do object to similar treatment of the Koran in The Satanic Verses. Hence all the fuss and bother, and let us not forget the violence. Rushdie may still be among the living, but others associated with The Satanic Verses have suffered or died: the Italian translator and the Norwegian publisher were wounded in attacks, the Japanese translator was stabbed to death, and the Turkish translator of The Satanic Verses narrowly escaped an arson attack that killed 37 people.

It's time for all this violence to stop. Everybody to the Time-Out Box: let's all take a long look into the Sea of Stories until the anger dies down. Maybe then we can have a reasonable discussion about Salman Rushdie.