Defend Fiction, and You Defend Truth : Read Writers Like Rushdie and See Humanity in Progress

Mikhail Bakhtin was perhaps the greatest theorist of the novel in our century. His life, in a way, is as exemplary as his writings. Shunted off to remote areas of the Soviet Union by the minions of Stalinism for his unorthodox ideas, Bakhtin could not profit from rehabilitation when it came under Brezhnev, simply because he had never been accused of anything. A victim of faceless intolerance, his political nemesis was Stalin, but his literary symbol was Kafka.

His case was and is not unique. I have thought a lot about Bakhtin while thinking about Salman Rushdie during these past few weeks. Rushdie’s work perfectly fits the Bakhtinian contention that ours is an age of competitive languages. The novel is the privileged arena where language in conflict can meet, bringing together, in tension and dialogue, not only opposing characters, but also different historical ages, social levels, civilizations and other, dawning realities of human life. In the novel, realities that are normally separated can meet, establishing an encounter of dialogue, a meeting with the other.

This is no gratuitous exercise. It reveals a number of things. The first is that, in dialogue, no one is absolutely right; neither speaker holds an absolute truth or has an absolute hold over history. Myself and the other, as well as the history that both of us are making, still are not. Both are unfinished and so can only continue to be. By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

This is what Milan Kundera means when he proposes that the novel is a constant redefinition of men and women as problems, never as sealed, concluded truths. But this is precisely what the ayatollahs of this world cannot suffer. For the ayatollahs, reality is dogmatically defined, once and for all, in a sacred text. But a sacred text is, by definition, a completed and exclusive text. You can add nothing to it. It does not converse with anyone. It is its own loudspeaker. It offers perfect refuge for the insecure, who then, having the protection of a dogmatic text over their heads, proceed to excommunicate those whose security lies in search for the truth. I remember Luis Bunuel often saying: “I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.”

This Bunuelian, surrealist sally is now being dramatically acted out in reverse. An author who is looking for the truth has been condemned to death by a priestly hierarchy whose deep insecurity is disguised by its pretension to holding the truth.

The ayatollahs, nevertheless, have done a great service to literature, if not to Islam. They have debased and caricatured their own faith. But they have shifted the wandering attention of the world to the power of words, literature and the imagination, in ways totally unforeseen in their philosophy.

For the intolerance of the ayatollahs not only sheds light on Salman Rushdie and his uses of the literary imagination. By making this imagination so dangerous that it deserves capital punishment, the sectarians have made people everywhere wonder what it is that literature can say that can be so powerful and, indeed, so dangerous.

In a deservedly famous commentary, Philip Roth once distinguished between reactions to literature East and West. In totalitarian regimes, Roth said, everything matters and nothing goes. In the liberal democracies, nothing matters and everything goes. Suddenly, “The Satanic Verses” has pushed the “nothing goes” of intolerance right out into the public squares of democratic indifference. Suddenly, we all realize that everything matters, whether it goes or not. I do not believe that there is a single intelligent writer in Europe, or both Americas, or Africa, Asia or Down Under, who does not feel threatened by the possibilities so melodramatically opened by the ayatollahs’ crusade against the freedom of the imagination. It can’t happen here? You can bet your bottom dollar, peso, franc or pound that it can.

Saying the same thing as Roth, Italo Calvino once wrote that when politics pays too much attention to literature, this is a bad sign, mostly for literature. But, he added, it is also a bad sign when politics doesn’t want to hear the word literature mentioned. It means that the society has become afraid of any use of language that calls into question the certitudes it holds about itself.

I have always conceived the novel (at least those I try to write) as a crossroads between the individual and the collective destinies of men and women. Both tentative, both unfinished, but both only sayable and minimally understandable if it is previously said and understood that, in fiction, truth is the search for truth, nothing is pre-established and knowledge is only what both of us--reader and writer--can imagine.

There is no other way to freely and fruitfully explore the possibilities of our unfinished humanity. No other way to refuse the death of the past, making it present through memory. No other way of effectively giving life to the future, through the manifestation of our desire now.

That these essential activities of the human spirit should be denied in the name of a blind yet omniscient, paralytical yet actively homicidal dogmatism is both a farce and a crime in itself. Salman Rushdie has done the true religious spirit a service by brilliantly imagining the tensions and complements that it establishes with the secular spirit. Humor, certainly, cannot be absent, since there is no contemporary language that can utter itself without a sense of the diversification of that same language. When we all understood everything, the epic was possible. But not fiction. The novel is born from the very fact that we do not understand one another any longer, because unitary, orthodox language has broken down. Quixote and Sancho, the Shandy brothers, Mr. and Mrs. Karenin: their novels are the comedy (or the drama) of their misunderstandings. Impose a unitary language and you kill the novel, but you also kill the society.

I hope that everyone, after what has happened to Salman Rushdie and “The Satanic Verses,” now understands this. Fiction is not a joke. It is but an expression of the cultural, personal and spiritual diversity of mankind. It cannot express that diversity if it only expresses one truth. It is a harbinger of a multipolar and multi-cultural world, where no single philosophy, no single belief, no single solution, can shunt aside the extreme wealth of mankind’s cultural heritage. Our future depends on the enlarged freedom for the multiracial and the polycultural to express itself in a world of shifting, decaying and emerging power centers.

Salman Rushdie has given form to a dilemma previously embodied, at diverse levels, in the West, by the novels of Bernanos, Mauriac and Camus, as well as by the films of Bergman, Fellini and Bunuel. And that is: Can we revolt back into the sacred? Can the religious mentality thrive outside religious dogma and hierarchy? These are questions essential to any idea of freedom. But the burdens of freedom, as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor well knew, can be heavier than the chains of slavery. Long live my chains! exclaimed the Spanish patriots painted by Goya as their revolutionary liberators, the Napoleonic troops, mowed them down. And, in another direction, Georg Buchner proclaimed, in “Danton’s Death,” that since God no longer existed, mankind was now responsible for its own destiny and could not shift the blame anymore.

The modern age, by liberating both the freedom for good and the freedom for evil, has placed upon us all the obligation to relativize both. Absolute good is called Pollyanna. Absolute evil is called Hitler. Relative good is called Simone Weil. Relative evil is called Sade. But the name of relativity is no longer virtue; it is value. Bad literature stays at the level of virtue: It pits good guys against bad guys. Good literature rises to the level of values in conflict with one another. This is what Salman Rushdie has done in all of his novels.

That Rushdie has dramatized the conflict within Islam does not, however, exempt those of us, within the Judeo-Christian tradition from looking at our own sources of intolerance or at our own limits when our own symbols are set into conflicting motion. Artists have been silenced or “disappeared” in Latin America for not spouting the official truth of our local, mostly military, ayatollahs. Jean Luc Godard in Europe and Martin Scorsese in the United States have been attacked for seriously exploring in the Catholic faith what Rushdie is exploring in the Islamic faith--that is, the combinations, the possibilities, the ghosts beyond the dogmas. A number of Jewish writers and comedians have poked fun at Judaism. What are the limits? What if a Jewish writer imagined Anne Frank as a young whore? What if a Catholic writer depicted Joseph as a jealous husband and the true betrayer of Christ?

The alarming thing about Salman Rushdie’s experience in intolerance is that it has revealed a seething alliance of commercial cowardice and fundamentalist intolerance surrounding the self-proclaimed island of rationality in any given society. Sects coexist with commercialism in Georgia and Guatemala. Let these two factors--booksellers and publishers succumbing to terrorist threats, and zealots of all faiths discovering their sectarian brotherhood, be it Muslim, Christian or Jewish--prevail, and the margins of freedom in our world will quickly and frighteningly shrink.

The defense of Salman Rushdie is a defense of ourselves. It is a matter of pride to say that Rushdie has given us all a better reason to understand and protect the profession of letters at the highest level of creativity, imagination, intelligence and social responsibility.