Truth, lies, literature
Stories help us understand the world but can also be twisted. ‘All there is to do is fight back,’ Salman Rushdie says
Salman Rushdie is, as you’d expect, somewhat wry and self-deprecating when describing his own personal bout of COVID-19.
“I wasn’t going to write about it at all,” he says in a Zoom call from a book-lined room in New York, a city he’s been hunkered down in for more than a year, after a dinner out last March at which, he believes, he caught the coronavirus. “We’ve all gone through the same thing; we all know what all of us know. Nobody has been spared this experience.”
But he did write about it; it’s the second-last essay in his new collection “Languages of Truth: Essays 20032020.”
His publisher thought it “might be interesting” if he did. While he didn’t think he had anything to say, he thought, “if I make it a personal story about being here, and what the city was like, just for the record, it might be valuable.”
And so in “Pandemic, A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus,” a 72year-old man with an underlying condition tells us about the roller-coaster of days with a fever that would spike to 103.5 and fall and rise again.
He tells how John Prine died. And Marianne Faithfull fought the virus. And a friend’s mother died and another friend’s father died.
How Eric Idle sang in Monty Python’s “Spamalot,” “I’m not dead yet.”
Or how Susan Sontag, in her book “Illness as Metaphor,” wrote that “illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness … is one … most resistant to metaphoric thinking.” And how an ISIS spokesman and others declared the coronavirus a punishment from God. Or, like that science-fiction trope, that the human race is a virus. How politicians characterize the pandemic as war.
His friends, he writes toward the end of the essay, said: “So now you’re Superman.” He tempers that: “I don’t feel very super. And I know that for every Superman there is also a rock of green Kryptonite.”
(Right after that essay comes the final piece in the book, a quick little piece — a Proust Questionnaire he did for Vanity Fair that included the question: “What is your most treasured possession?” His answer? “Reasonably good health.” A prescient observation, all things considered.)
That second-last essay in the book, as it turns out, fits well with the opening essay: “Wonder Tales,” both of them exploring in their own ways the idea of metaphor and heroes, and how interpretations can be used for ill or for good — to help us understand the world, for example. All themes that run throughout these essays.
But stories can also be twisted and manipulated. He gives the example of the Sanskrit epic “Ramayana,” in which
Lakshman draws a line to protect his sister. When she crosses it to give a beggar alms, she’s kidnapped and thus begins a war to get her back. Rushdie recounts how, a few years ago, when a young woman was gang-raped in India, “a state minister said that if she hadn’t “crossed the Lakshman rekha” (taken a bus home with a friend) she would have been OK. “His use of the metaphor revealed that too many men in India still believe that there are limits and boundaries women should not transgress,” Rushdie writes.
Whatever we later do as adults with those stories, in many of them “it is children who grow into heroes, often to rescue the adult world.” Because adults, he writes, often forget the truths in those stories.
“I suppose the whole first section of the book, which examines old stories and what they have to tell us, is a kind of way of trying to get the conversation back into a better place,” he says. “What I think is that nothing lasts thousands of years if it doesn’t have something very important to say to us. And wherever in the world these mythologies come from, they’re like very concentrated little packages of meaning.”
This is a way of explaining, too, that, in Rushdie’s book of essays, one thought follows another, picks up a theme, a philosophy, contracts and expands, each piece containing a world. A wonderful book to sit down with, to be amused by and to think about. To evoke the power of stories.
“I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are,” he writes.
The essays in this volume are gleaned from work done between 2003 and 2020: pieces, lectures and other work. Every one of them, he says, has been rejigged somehow: “Wonder Tales” is a composite of three other pieces because “they all were related ideas.” Others were lectures that he gave, cut and reshaped to fit this new format “because the rhythms of oral speech are different from the rhythms on the page.”
They’ve been organized into four sections, the first, as he notes above, examines old stories and what they have to tell us — but also the stories’ impact on him. His last book, “Quichotte,” a modern retelling of “Don Quixote,” has feet in the opioid epidemic, for example.
The second explores our cultural inheritance, with essays about Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth and Hans Christian Andersen and even a flick at the supermodel Linda Evangelista, who has often been misquoted but said, “We (the supermodels) don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day.” That sentence and her persona evoke most of the seven deadly sins (barring gluttony): pride, greed and sloth, and lust, envy and anger. “Not bad!” he says.
The third section of the book begins with two essays, “Truth” and “Courage,” and continues with various “Texts for PEN” and other essays.
In “Truth,” he mentions the idea of “rubble literature,” referring to, in Germany after the Second World War, writers who understood that reality and truth needed to be “reconstructed from the ground up.”
“The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea,” he writes. While we’re lamenting the idea of “fake news” and Donald Trump, of rebuilding, he writes that “We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of truth. And it is for us, writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers, to undertake the task of rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality, their faith in the truth.”
All right, I ask him, now what do we do? If we’re climbing out of the rubble, where does that leave us? “I think we know what truth is,” he says, “because the trouble is we’ve been confronted with a barrage of lies telling us that they’re the truth … We have one of the major political parties in this country still fostering the lie that the election was stolen,” he says.
“All there is to do is fight back, and I think there’s a point at which there’s no compromise here. If someone’s lying to you can’t say, well, let’s see how we can work it out.”
In the book he quotes the poet Shelley, calling on writers to be “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“It was a phrase Christopher Hitchens liked a lot,” Rushdie muses as we talk, Hitchens being another of his contemporaries explored in an essay. But Rushdie says that he himself doesn’t try to “overclaim” for literature — books rarely change the world (except for a book like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which had “a big direct influence” on the way people — including Abraham Lincoln — viewed slavery). But it can, he says, change readers.
“One of the things that happens when you read a book that you love is that its way of seeing becomes, to some degree, your way of seeing. That vision of the world you take as a part of your vision of the world. That’s the magic.”
I mention Colson Whitehead, who won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for “The Underground Railroad,” and whose book “The Nickel Boys” also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. “He can do that,” I suggest. I went to Florida shortly after reading “Nickel Boys” — it completely changed the mythology of the state; I will never see it the same way again. That’s power.
“I’m glad you mention Colson,” Rushdie says, “because I think the best work that’s being done right now is by African American writers, and writers who are recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants.”
They are “literally transforming what American literature is.”
He rhymes off a list of some of the greatest: Viet Thanh Nguyen (“The Sympathizer,” “The Committed”) and Nam Le (“The Boat”) from Vietnam; Jhumpa Lahiri (“The Interpreter of Maladies,” “Whereabouts”) from India; Junot Diaz (“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”) from the Caribbean; Korean-American Min Jin Lee (“Pachinko”); or Black American Jesmyn Ward, biracial poet Natasha Trethewey. “There are writers who manage to cross the fiction/nonfiction boundary like Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
Barring Coates, most of the authors he mentions write fiction. He’s written before, and does in the book, that “we live in the age of nonfiction.” Interesting given he’s interrogating the languages of truth.
It’s partially a commercial thing. “You talk to booksellers, talk to publishers, they will say to you that’s where the action is. That it’s actually much easier to sell a good book of nonfiction than to sell a new literary novel.”
When he was starting out, he says, in the ’70s, people were excited about adventurous new kinds of fiction, from writers we now think of as part of the canon: Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro.
“We all benefited from the fact that readers were curious about new kinds of ways of telling stories.”
Now, he says, he feels that people want in their fiction “small beautiful things than (big rambling worlds). And people like reading true stories.”
Fashion changes. “All you can do is just keep doing the thing you do. And wait for the wheel to turn.”
It’s not all literature and mythology and philosophy. The stories of our childhood — comics and movies — form part of our personal mythologies, too. Going back to the idea of the hero, he’s also written about Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.”
It was one of the movies he was most attracted to as a child. “It seemed to me to put a child into the hero position, which I hadn’t seen before. Heroes were always enormous men.”
But what he realized about that movie is that “all the adults are useless. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry can’t save the dog. The Wizard’s a fraud. And so Dorothy has to do it all by herself.”
And so it becomes, basically, a film about growing up. “About taking responsibility for yourself and doing for yourself what can’t be done for you. The people you thought would protect you can’t protect you.”
The message is that, “essentially, you’re on your own, kid.” That’s a lesson we all have to learn at some point.
“I think the best work that’s being done right now is by African American writers, and writers who are recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants.” SALMAN RUSHDIE
During the early months of the pandemic, “I remember leaning out of my window with a saucepan and a spoon,” Rushdie says. Along with the rest of us around the world, showing appreciation for heroic actions of health-care workers.
“It also showed you something about the resilience of human beings and their desire to rise above the thing that confronts them. If it hadn’t been for the incompetence of our leaders, we might have done a whole lot better.”
But maybe our superpower is in our ability to read and to wonder.
Turns out he did have something to say.