A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
My main literary production this week: an essay apparently about Troilus and Cressida but really about why the man from Stratford wrote the plays of Shakespeare—and why, furthermore, it’s weak-minded and bathetic to let yourself believe otherwise. You can read it here or here. Otherwise, at the bloody crossroads of literature and politics, we have only one thing to discuss this week: the attack on Salman Rushdie.
It’s strange, I thought yesterday, the way the left-liberal literati seems to be handling the Rushdie attack better than I imagined it would—better, for example, than it handled the Charlie Hebdo murders in 2015. As Bari Weiss reminds us right here on Substack,
Months before, a dozen staff members of Charlie Hebdo were murdered by two terrorists in their offices. It was impossible to think of a publication that deserved to be recognized and elevated more.
And yet the response from more than 200 of the world’s most celebrated authors was to protest the award. Famous writers—Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Michael Cunningham, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, Junot Díaz—suggested that maybe the people who had just seen their friends murdered for publishing a satirical magazine were a little bit at fault, too. That if something offends a minority group, that perhaps it shouldn’t be printed. And those cartoonists were certainly offensive, even the dead ones. These writers accused PEN of “valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”
There was a lot of bad faith involved in the Hebdo matter. Teju Cole, for example, justified his position that the Hebdo dead should not be honored by PEN with a meretricious insistence that there was no comparison between The Satanic Verses (“blasphemy”) and the Hebdo cartoons (“racism”). This is false. Were the Charlie Hebdo comics racist? Sure, I thought they were, and I thought they were stupid and ugly too. Personally, I wouldn’t line a bird cage with that crap. But once those cartoons became a symbol of free expression under threat of murder—a symbol, ultimately, of ideological conflict desublimated into civil violence—they had to be defended as such. And Rushdie’s offense in the eyes of his detractors also included his own putatively racist and reactionary portrayal of Britain’s immigrant communities—especially its black immigrant communities—in The Satanic Verses.
Is the novel’s portrayal racist? I don’t remember. I haven’t read The Satanic Verses since I was a teenager, and I mainly read it then out of an adolescent duty to whatever reading material was said to be forbidden, controversial, or dangerous. I do remember being impressed, impressed enough to also read Rushdie’s then-newest novel, the alt-history rock-and-roll saga The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which I think I liked even better.
But I eventually allowed those famous bad reviews by Tim Parks and James Wood to talk me into the idea that Rushdie’s literary pyrotechnics were too easy. And then what I took to be the ethic of his work, the commendation of cultural hybridity and secular hedonism for all, came in the 21st century to seem facile, simplistic, a kind of pseudo-democratic ad for the rich’s new scheme to dissolve the nation-state and religion, not because they were oppressive, though they sometimes were, but because they stood in the path of total technological management and capital penetration. So I never went back to Rushdie, not even to read Midnight’s Children, which remains a lamentable gap in my literary experience.
2006, the year I entered graduate school for English Literature, was the year the department’s most renowned professor published Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, with its central chapter revisiting the Rushdie affair from the perspective of the War on Terror. The professor’s first book, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (1989), had been one of the earliest single-author academic studies of Rushdie. It was written as a dissertation at Columbia under the supervision of Rushdie’s friend Edward Said, and then, in the spotlight of the fatwa, published by a trade press despite its relative Marxist scorn for the company of popular post-communist left-liberal late-Cold-War cosmopolitan writers to which Rushdie belonged (think the magical realists). Our critic would crown his career in 2021 with a popular biography of his mentor, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said. He might have been my own advisor, but for one reason or another, I didn’t work with him, though I might have enjoyed an academic career if I had.
Anyway, back to 2006—to Wars of Position—to the way Rushdie appeared in the Bush years’ lurid bomb-glare. Our critic, who shall remain nameless here, spends one chapter of a book otherwise devoted to a Gramscian and self-styled “left-Hegelian” assault on poststructuralist theory lamenting what became of Rushdie under the pressure of the fatwa—or even before, considering, as our critic does, the aforementioned racism said to mar the pages of The Satanic Verses. In the end, this irreverent immigrant novelist with “a warmly social democratic public persona,” the scourge of Thatcher’s racist capitalist Britain, ended up siding with the UK and US governments’ “Western cosmopolitan triumphalism,” denouncing Islam tout court, and supporting the war in Afghanistan.
One had the right to reprimand Rushdie for using these resources so readily at hand and so abundantly supplied by an eager press and pro-Israeli political establishment, both of which were now dislodging him from his earlier views.
How did Rushdie end up going along for “the latest right turn of the Granta left”? The question obviously answers itself. (Academics are never very good with the obvious.) But Rushdie, even without the fatwa, seems like a consummate novelist in the Dickensian tradition: a sponge for the zeitgeist, a maven of media, led around by the news and able to recreate the headlines in irresistibly seductive narratives, “seductive” being Toni Morrison’s apt word for the affective experience of Rushdie’s fiction in the blurb on the back of The Ground Beneath Her Feet—but not much of an original thinker.
Rushdie’s current political opinions, which appear to have been mainlined straight from MSNBC, suggest as much. In that sense, and in that sense alone, our Marxist critic is correct about Rushdie, despite the nausea occasioned by his claimed right of “reprimand,” as if he were slapping a paddle on his calloused palm and ordering the errant novelist to bend over. The antidote to ideological credulity on the part of celebrity authors, however, is unrestricted freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of art to contest their doxa—and not the customary Marxist expedient of restricting speech, thought, and art in favor of whatever Marxists deem a superior doxology.
But if the literati is acquitting itself better in the case of Rushdie’s stabbing than they did when the cartoonists were murdered, I suspect it has less to do with a renewed commitment to civic freedom than with a newfound devotion to the enlightened professional. High culture’s sense of social mission included freedom of speech when the artist was construed as bohemian outsider, journalistic muckraker, or Socratic gadfly; but it no longer does, since the artist has become a credentialed academic and high culture has been elided with official expertise, which must be defended against the grasping, greasy fingers of the inexpert hoi polloi. The good liberal Rushdie may therefore now be seen by his colleagues less as a martyr to imperiled free speech than to dishonored expert knowledge; they may understand stabbing him as akin not to shooting racist cartoonists or deplatforming “disinformation” but to contesting the dicta of public health officials.
In situations as serious as the attempted assassination of an artist, however, we should take the right answer even for the wrong reason.