Salman Rushdie: Critical Perspective

Novelist, essayist, travel writer and screenwriter, martyr for free speech and purveyor of story as political statement, Rushdie has not only achieved the singular distinction of being recognised as an artist in his own lifetime but is also arguably the most prominent novelist of the late 20th century, both for his literary achievements and for the controversy surrounding them. Like Marquez in Spanish, Rushdie has taken history as his subject and fictionalised it, thus instituting a new genre. He has received almost every award in the course of a near 30-year career and has become the living image of the romantic writer; worldly, erudite and knowing, equally at ease with the purveyors of pop culture and the intellectual arbiters of literary taste, scabrous critic of colonialism, be it political, social or cultural, and, despite his deep connection to the events of his time he remains somehow removed from the ordinary sphere of existence; abstract, aloof, distant.

In his novel Shame (1983), Rushdie writes, ‘is history to be considered the property of the participants solely?’ and in Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of essays on racism in Britain, he calls for ‘books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world.’ Both of these quotes offer keys to an understanding of the author. Rushdie is renowned for taking symbols and figures from different myth systems and religions and interweaving them with different juxtapositions: themes from Islam and Hinduism are interwoven with figures from English literature and English literary references. His work advocates that the cultural exchange brought about by Empire has enriched rather than cheapened contemporary literature; in his fiction Rushdie has demanded the right, in a fractured and confused post-colonial climate, to be a part of the telling of one’s own history. Rushdie has challenged official historical truth, launched vituperative attacks on petty nationalism and the censorship of the state, all the while wrapping his readers in the magic realist swirl of dreamscape and fairytale in which the conventional is challenged with astonishing wit and intellectual daring.

Rushdie’s narrators are unreliable and intrusive; the ‘I’ narrating is essentially an essayist, Rushdie’s literary default setting. These narrators cajole and harry, taunt and tease with a thunderous irreverence; what is the significance of fictions they ask, what purpose do they serve, what role do they play? Rushdie’s belief is in the transformative power of fiction; stories posit alternative realities, they reclaim the past and through the smashing of convention via the element of the fantastical, proffer a utopian vision of the future.

Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus (1975), is often overlooked in any overview of the writer’s oeuvre, perhaps because it lacks the marked sense of geographical and historical context which characterises his later and more acclaimed work. Grimus, the tale of Flapping Eagle, the novel’s immortal hero, who travels to Calf Island after seven hundred years of sailing the seas with the hope of regaining his mortality, is a beautiful book; funny and often surprisingly touching. A science fiction based hybrid of religious myth and literary pastiche, Grimus has all the simplicity and sense of magic of folktale, and all the complexity of a deeply questioning philosophical novel. Grimus introduces in raw form many of the themes developed by Rushdie in his later writing, such as displacement, unstable identity and cultural hybridity.

Rushdie followed Grimus with the Booker Prize for Fiction winner, Midnight’s Children (1981), which traces India’s development from independence and partition in 1947, through the secession of Bangladesh to the state of emergency under Indira Ghandi. The history of India is given phantasmagorical form by the novel’s protagonist and narrator Saleem Sinai, a Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims, who comes to believe his own life is a metaphor for the state of his country. Saleem has decided to tell his life story and the story of India as he is, quite literally, falling apart, ‘I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug.’ The children of the book’s title are all born at midnight on the day India’s independence is declared. There are 1,001 of them and all have a special ability. Saleem’s is telepathy and it is this gift which allows him to discover the truth about his own identity and those of the other children. Considered by many to be Rushdie’s masterpiece, Midnight’s Children is extraordinary for its vast historical sweep and the confidence of its archly modernist prose. It recalls Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum but distinguishes itself by its dazzling pyrotechnic display of style: the dizzying array of puns and alliteration, word play and rhyme is at times breathtaking for its exuberant bravery. Rushdie has stated that Joyce and Grass taught him that anything was possible in literature, that boundaries are arbitrary limits imposed by man, that art with belief in itself can rewrite any set of conventions, however firmly entrenched. With Midnight’s Children, Rushdie proved that he was more than capable of upsetting the literary apple cart.

Following Midnight’s Children was Shame (1983). Set in the fictional country of Peccavistan, it is a thinly veiled satirical history of Pakistan and recalls historical events through the prism of a family drama involving a military dictator and his mentally retarded, ultimately murderous daughter. Less effusive and energetic than Midnight’s Children, it is a darker, subtler, work.

As politically contentious as these books were, Rushdie is most famous, however, for the extraordinary furore surrounding the fatwa-inspiring The Satanic Verses (1988), which earned him international notoriety amongst Muslims for its unfavourable depiction of the prophet Mohammed, and its fictional reworking of an apocryphal episode from Islamic history. Coloured by the controversy surrounding the novel, the actual merits of it are, even now, often overlooked. Although it may not, stylistically speaking, be Rushdie’s most accomplished work, it is none the less an astoundingly ambitious novel: a cutting satire on the state of migration in the United Kingdom and a vivid and compelling exploration of good and evil, religious faith and fanatical belief. It asks us to discern reality from the illusory and although Islam charged Rushdie with incorporating events depicted in the Koran, this is something that Rushdie vehemently denied.

In recent years Rushdie has looked to the West for his inspiration. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) retells the myth of Orpheus through the lives of two 20th century Indian-born rock stars as well as detailing the history of rock and roll in America, whilst Fury (2001) is the tale of a brilliant man, in decline and exiled in New York, groping for meaning as he stumbles through his increasingly tense liaisons with women half his age.

Whatever Rushdie does next will be a literary event: it could not be anything else.

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Garan Holcombe, 2004
For an in-depth critical review see Salman Rushdie by Damian Grant (Northcote House, 1999: Writers and their Work Series).
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