From Fatwa to fabulism

Book review of LANGUAGES OF TRUTH: Essays 2003-2020

The venerable novelist Salman Rushdie’s new essay collection, Languages of Truth, has big ambitions. As its subtitle suggests, it aims to tackle this still-young century’s political and cultural upheaval. Mr Rushdie spreads his arms wide here, embracing everything from the novels of Philip Roth to the death of Osama bin Laden to the art of Kara Walker, in an attempt to convey a sense of the challenges that those 18 years have presented to Western literary culture. But in trying to get his arms around so much so indiscriminately, Mr Rushdie serves up a confused vision of this century, presenting a self-absorbed and exhausted thinker whose eye has been tracking yesterday’s concerns.

Mr Rushdie, of course, charted a course as a political thinker in the early and mid-aughts, wielding the intellectual and moral authority that’d accrued to him after the infamous fatwa controversy in 1989, when Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Mr Rushdie’s murder following the publication of The Satanic Verses, partly inspired by the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the writer spoke out against “radical Islam” in particular and religion in general, as dogmatic frameworks that posed existentialist threats to liberal values of free speech and individuality.

That’s all to say that Mr Rushdie is a novelist with very specific political investments, though you wouldn’t know it from the editorial presentation of Languages of Truth. The volume arrives without a preface that might lay out a rationale for its necessity: Why this collection of essays, introductions and speeches — and why now? Only a handful of the texts included have dates affixed to them, so that readers will be hard-pressed to perceive any historical or political arc at play. The tome is divided into four parts, but because these parts do not have titles, the logic of their organisation is a mere intimation. Readers are left without a roadmap through the collection, or any way of understanding Mr Rushdie’s intentions, turning the book’s eclecticism into a liability.

Things do become clear once we settle into Mr Rushdie’s criticism, which evinces a catholic cultural appetite, equally ravenous for classic Hindu myths as it is for Samuel Beckett’s novels. In the opening essay, “Wonder Tales” — as close as we get to a mission statement in this book — Mr Rushdie traces the diffusion of Indian stories into Persia, the Arab world and eventually Europe, to become what we know of as The Arabian Nights. He writes: “This great migration of narrative has inspired much of the world’s literature, all the way down to the magic realism of the South American fabulists, so that when I, in my turn, used some of those devices, I had the feeling of closing a circle and bringing that story tradition all the way back home to the country in which it began.” This commitment to a global literature avant la lettre comes to the fore in the collection’s most coherent moments, showcasing Mr Rushdie’s belief that literature is naturally rooted in multiplicity, migration and exchange.

LANGUAGES OF TRUTH: Essays 2003-2020

Author: Salman Rushdie

Publisher: Penguin 

Price: Rs 799; Pages: 416

Unfortunately, it’s the most vital observation on cultural politics this volume has to offer. Elsewhere, he repeats his well-worn attacks on religious faith, objectionable not because they are offensive but because they are as blinkered and dogmatic as the theisms he wants to leave behind. “Outgrowing the gods is the birth of individual and social liberty,” he writes in the essay “The Liberty Instinct,” disregarding entire religious traditions rooted in the struggle for liberation.

These essays are at their best when Mr Rushdie trains his attention on literature. An essay on Shakespeare conveys some of the delirious joy inherent in reading Hamlet. The play is a ghost story, Mr Rushdie concedes, but not only that, “because it keeps changing form, becoming, by turns, a murder story, and a political drama about intrigues at the Danish court and the threat of invasion by Fortinbras, and a psychodrama about indecision, and a revenge tragedy, and a tragic love story, and a postmodernist play about a play.” Here Mr Rushdie is a reader — not a terribly original one, but one whose enthusiasm and attentiveness to pleasure take centre stage.

It’s too bad, then, that the actual criticism of literature leaves so much to be desired. Mr Rushdie is given to easy observations that don’t require keenness of thought on his part. In “Wonder Tales,” he erects a lazy binary to which he returns throughout the collection, one between realist fiction on the one hand and “fabulist” fiction on the other. In his version of literary history, realism has won out over fabulism, never mind that he goes on to cite authors like Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado and Helen Oyeyemi as practitioners of this tradition.

The most disappointing aspect of this collection is that writers of colour and queer writers form a spectral presence in Rushdie’s framework. Readers will find few attempts to wrestle with the challenges that non-white writers pose to our understanding of concepts like free speech and individual liberty. The result is a book that feels limited in its political concerns, and out of touch with the most pressing questions facing contemporary literary culture in this century.

©2021 The New York Times News Service