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Rushdie: Literally Life-Death

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<i> Donne Raffat is an Iranian-born novelist, the author of "The Caspian Circle" and "The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi" (Syracuse University Press). </i>

As long as Salman Rushdie’s fiction was regarded as a sort of personalized account of contemporary history--the partition of India in “Midnight’s Children” and the founding of Pakistan in “Shame”--he could be left in relative peace to follow his fancy. But once his fiction passed beyond the historical realm to that of the sacred, it was not to be tolerated.

In “Shame” (1983), the man who has become the world’s most newsworthy novelist interrupts his story to recount an unsettling personal episode--perhaps real, perhaps imagined. An irate Pakistani--presumably speaking in his native tongue--berates the author for writing about a country he has abandoned for England:

“Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! . . . We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies?”

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To this the author responds in English: “Is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories?”

Then, turning to the reader, the author tries to make his case even more plainly. The country he is writing about, he states, is “not Pakistan, or not quite.” He explains, “There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exists, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centering to be necessary.”

Why does a brilliant storyteller stop the flow of story to jar the reader? Would Dickens, say, have dropped his narrative thread to point out that the London he is writing about is not the real London? Yet a mark of Rushdie’s fiction is that the distinction between the “real and fictional” is never quite lost, even though the two occupy “almost the same space.” His “fictional” world--however, rich, absorbing and complex--never fully draws the reader into its own “reality.”

And this is the case, Rushdie writes, because of his own “off-centering”--his own perspective arising from his immigrant experience. Unlike Dickens, Rushdie is not “centered” in any one society he is writing about and living in.

The man who called down the murderous rage of the ayatollah was separated at age 14 from an India that itself had only recently been divided. Rushdie left his native Bombay for an English school and then Cambridge University. Rather than moving on with his family to Pakistan, he remained in England to write his first novel, “Midnight’s Children” (1981), winning the prestigious Booker Prize. With that start, the course of Rushdie’s artistic career was defined: He was to explore, novelistically, the dimensions of the world he had left behind, many of its conflicting elements still clinging to him--and to the collective immigrant life in his contemporary London.

Beyond that was the promise of completing his exit, through writing.

“I tell myself,” Rushdie reminisces rather wistfully in “Shame,” “that this will be a novel of leave-taking, my last words on the East, from which, many years ago, I began to come unloose.” But he also adds: “I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands.”

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After the events of the past few weeks, those “bands” must have snapped: not intrinsically but extrinsically, with the extraordinary response to his third and most notorious novel, “The Satanic Verses.”

Yet again, before forging ahead, Rushdie made his characteristic distinction. “It was so, it was not so.”

This is the prelude to the infamous passage in “The Satanic Verses” that has caused so much hostility, aptly described as a dream within a fiction--twice removed from the action. (Please see Book Review, Page 15, for a portion of the dream sequence.)

If Rushdie was once at pains to distinguish between the “real and fictional,” then consider the further extension of setting his action within a “dream.”

But dream or no dream, fiction or no fiction, he had dealt with the Word and Messenger of God in disparaging fashion. He had depicted the Prophet Mohammed, wrestling with God’s “recitation”--the one miracle in Islam--while also being tempted by the devil. He had caught the Prophet at his most problematical moment--which is what Rushdie tends to do with his most intriguing characters--and that was sacrilege.

In the eyes of devout Muslims, the Prophet was perfect: a man of no compromise, regardless of the faulty accounts by the two early Arab historians on which Rushdie had based his “dream” episode. Those accounts had long since been excised and discredited, as would Rushdie’s novel likewise have to be. Where the Koran is concerned, there is no historical or fictional tampering.

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In the eyes of devout Muslims, the author had to be taught a lesson. More: He had to be made an example to other tamperers.

All of this must have been a terrible blow and still remains a terrifying ordeal for Salman Rushdie. As a “lapsed Muslim,” by his own admission, he had unwittingly offended many of his own people; and, as a novelist, he had come to see his own worst fear realized: despite all his art and cunning, his fiction had been taken literally.

This is the worst fear of many writers in the East, regardless of the regime they are living under. Once one’s fiction is refused to be seen as being fictional, then any of one’s characters can be the cause of one’s own undoing.

Rushdie is the one writer in the West who is being treated as though he (and his publisher) were still in the East. Eventually, as the West regains equilibrium and combats obduracy with equal obduracy, one hopes the situation will be rectified, with Salman Rushdie still alive and writing.

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