On Fictionalizing the Real

The Editors and Editorial Community

India banned The Satanic Verses 'for its own sake'. The book was not declared blasphemous. It was considered to be a civil act comparable to shouting 'fire' in a crowded cinema hall. In October 1988, Salman Rushdie made a 'private' letter of protest to India's Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, available for publication in newspapers like The New York Times. Without addressing the violence of communal (Hindu-Muslim) riots in recent years in India, around what - on the surface - appear to be non-inflammatory issues, he invoked members of the Western avant-garde like Harold Pinter as fellow objectors, and threatened that India would be the laughingstock of the world for having allowed a finance ministry to pass judgement on a piece of literature. Mr. Rushdie insisted that literature and politics be separate and autonomous spheres for public and civil discourse, and that they must be so everywhere.

Public debate continued in India, and began in England. In January and February, protestors in India and in Pakistan rioted. Lives were lost. India and Pakistan have the largest Muslim population of any world region, and it is on the subcontinent that the material manifestations of the ongoing controversy continued to be visible. By now, it must have become clear to the Ayatollah that this was an issue - set up for him on the subcontinent - around which he could retrieve the Revolution for Iran. He did so in the political context of challenges from the moderates there, and in the face of the economic hardship brought on by the Iran-Iraq war.

With the rare occurrence of a book banning in India, many issues in the internationalization of culture were opened up. But these issues were not then debated actively by Western intellectuals or in the Western press. With the dramatic entry of the Ayatollah into the controversy, an irreversible faultline was created in world (and national) politics.

Now we are all being coerced to take sides in the Salman Rushdie controversy. The pressing question is: are there only two sides? Or are there more? In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, responding to the book-burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford, England, Rushdie has made it clear that those who stand for him (and for whatever he stands for) must choose now. The ageing leader of the Iranian Revolution has, in his own way, made it equally clear that it is time to take sides. But what are we being asked to take sides about?

There is the obvious and recurring problem of censorship, which is a special issue in democratic societies, and in novels as diverse as Joyce's Ulysses and Nabokov's Lolita. We have been invited to consider whether certain kinds of art should or should not be subject to censorship by the state, in the service of some part (or all) of the public interest. The Satanic Verses clearly raises the question of censorship, though in a peculiar way; it is a transnational form of censorship that the Ayatollah - and those who are sympathetic to the radical Islamic view of Rushdie's book - seek to impose. They wish to proscribe certain acts of reading outside the normal (national) boundaries of their writ. Yet they speak not only the language of human decency and respect for the beliefs of others, but also the language of a militant, transnational Islam, whose believers constitute vocal constituencies in many countries, including those in which freedom of expression is a treasured value. Thus, in the diaspora of the Islamic argument from India, Pakistan and Iran to the United States, it has undergone a subtle metamorphosis, couched in the language of fundamentalist fury at its Eastern pole, and cast in the terminology of respect for the rights of religious 'others' at its Western pole. England, clearly, is the point where the one argument transmutes itself into the other.

There is also the image and reality of book-burning, which, of course, is calculated to touch post-Enlightenment liberal opinion at its core - where sacred power attaches to the free circulation of the printed word. The assumption is that the intelligent reader should be free to read what he or she likes and think what he or she chooses. Book-burning is at least as powerful an image in the logocentric West as the burning of widows in India. So while we in the Euro-American axis fight over the burning of books, whole nations (like India) brought up on other ideas about civility, liberation and representation battle over the rights to communities to burn their women. Is it conceivable that there are those who condemn the one without condemning the other? Or are they both equally deadly acts? Have we come to think of works as lives? And is their protection equally a matter of human rights? Or is the case of book-burning a case of human rights whereas the case of bride-burning is a matter of the right to be human?

Of course, the fact that the Ayatollah has put out a contract on the author of The Satanic Verses raises another complicated set of moral herrings, some of which are surely red, and all of which demand to be read. This is transnational terror; the Ayatollah seeks to hijack a book and to hold hostage the publishing industry along with its many transnational readerships, and the dollars which they promise. Our sympathies must go out to Rushdie and his wife as they seek to balance their fierce personal anger with a justifiable desire to escape the wrath of the Ayatollah's armed minions. But must our sympathies also go out to Viking, with its greedy eyes on a vast transnational readership, or to the many book-dealers who can combine moral courage with high profit. The cowards here are easy to identify, but the hypocritical are camouflaged beyond discovery.

As for Salman Rushdie, he has repeatedly stressed that his novel is about migration and metamorphosis, among other things. Whatever he may mean by this gloss, it certainly reminds us that Rushdie's voice is part of the literature of exile, a literature whose politics has always been tied up with certain high-minded claims to cosmopolitanism. This sort of exile is painful but it is also seductive, since it tempts its spokesmen to regard themselves as specially qualified to pronounce on the worlds of others who they regard as morally and culturally more sedentary than themselves. But the fact is today that migration and exile characterize many individuals. Villagers in cities throughout the world, Shia Muslims in Sunni societies, Turkish guest-workers in Sweden, Palestinians in Detroit, these are proletarian cosmopolitans, cosmopolitans in spite of themselves. They do not like Rushdie's elegy to exile. Their exile is more mundane, though no less troubling to them. In their search for moral certainty in a world they have lost, they may not appreciate the subtle ironies and metaphorical imaging of Rushdie's reflections on exile, on migration, on memory and on history. In today's world, the poetic and intellectual voices of exile have to engage these more proletarian cosmopolites, whose voices may be less civil and more inchoate, but whose anguish and anger cannot be dismissed as atavistic or mindless. Exile is no longer the psychic privilege of the avant garde.

There is also the matter of art and the artistic imagination. This is the high ground that Rushdie - and his many supporters throughout the world - seek to occupy. The Satanic Verses is a work of art, they say. Secular it is, but blasphemous it is not. If there are blasphemous images, ideas or utterances in the book, then these are parts of the lives of the characters (not of the author), and the characters represent a complex set of issues concerning truth and beauty, the darkness of the soul, and the terrible rift between good and evil in the human spirit. The Satanic Verses ostensibly belongs to a genre which originated in Latin America called magic realism. There it is a genre of resistance and active (political, notably not religious) subversion. What are we to make of its use in this case - where fiction is not allied with an Islamic variant on liberation theology as it is in Latin American case of magic realism? That life exceeds art, and thus that certain forms of art can take childish chances with the subject matter of history? What is the Muslim reader to do with the idea that The Satanic Verses may be magic realism? Magic to whom? Realist about what? The book may well appeal to a sense of magic which has been cultivated by a certain postmodern imagination dancing on the grave of the very Enlightenment that spawned it. Can audiences outside this charmed circle be blamed for not quite understanding what this magic is about? As for realism, ever since Lukacs we have known that realism is a peculiarly unnatural convention born in reaction to the conventions of Romanticism, once again a parochial episode in the recent literary history of the West. But should this be considered magic realism at all? Or has a new genre of literature been created?

The ostensible magic realism of The Satanic Verses is the artifact of a recent set of ideas about art and the imagination, about fiction and its privileges, about resistance and its possibilities, about history and its uses. This set of ideas has its virtues, and the values on which it is founded have a right to be heard, but that they cause dismay to a world untutored in these local understandings should cause little surprise. This is a private conversation which has been globalized, largely because it is promoted by some very powerful commercial publishing interests, but also because the Enlightenment idea that values were by definition either common or meant to be common has not yet come to be a universal moral axiom. The Enlightenment meta-axiom, that all axioms deserve a hearing, is itself being contested, and who is to arbitrate that contest?

And yet, in a funny way, all this furor about the rights of the writer has little to do with reading. Many have pointed out that those protesting on the streets of the United States, England, Iran, India, and Pakistan have not read the book. What then are they protesting? Do they have the right to protest without first joining the charmed circle that can 'fully' appreciate the subtleties of magic realism? In our view, the politics of The Satanic Verses is partly about the rights of people to resist reading, and especially to resist reading what they have been told by others whom they hold in respect they should not read. The issue, that is, concerns the relationship between reading and power. Our post-Enlightenment assumption is that all intelligent criticism must follow the individualized act of reading. Some groups in the Islamic world are saying that criticism - socially, politically and collectively constructed - can precede the individual act of reading. In this deconstructionist world, is this a barbaric view? Or are these textual strategies reserved to those of the English-speaking world, who aspire to be published in The New York Review of Books and Granta, and who know the right reasons to mourn the recent death of Bruce Chatwin?

Above all, the complex set of issues surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses (and its translation and dissemination around the world) has forcefully brought to our attention the internationalization of what Jurgen Habermas called the bourgeois public sphere. Those who wish to ban the book are saying that their views have a rightful place in the new configuration of readers and writers that constitutes the transnational topos of the printed world. These are not people who have been raised on Enlightenment ideas about the autonomous subject, about the freedom of the literary imagination or about the rights of texts to circulate freely. Will we grant these voices the right to speak to us without condemning them as barbarian, because they are associated with terrorist directives that many of them abhor as much as we do?

More important still, is there any possibility in debates like this to create what Charles Taylor has recently called a meta-topical space? This is a space in which battles about the discourse of modernity - and not just battles within the discourse of modernity - can be conducted? Until we find such a space (or spaces), we shall be condemned to equate millions of decent Muslims (and others who see the writing of The Satanic Verses as an incendiary action) with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his homicidal decrees.

To take sides now is not the urgent task. The urgent task is to acknowledge the need to shape an emergent field - a third space - from which critical issues can be argued; in this case, a space for arguments about art, censorship and magic realism in which slogans about universal freedoms do not disguise deep parochialisms of value. We proposed in an essay in the first issue of this journal that public culture points to a zone of contestation, a zone in which the nation-state provides only one problematic node in a larger set of transnational cultural flows. The controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses is strong evidence that whether we like it or not, certain matters of transnational consequence are increasingly matters for public debate across national and cultural boundaries.

Public culture is not necessarily formed through civil discourse within homogeneous cultural worlds. Our problem is: can civility be reconstructed in a heterogeneous and decentered postcolonial world, where voices from one cultural trajectory are - for many reasons - interjected into the cultural politics of other trajectories? The first step towards answering this question is to ask whether we can insist that our realisms (magic or otherwise) have the axiomatic right to be interjected into other realisms, and, if so, under what conditions and with what sort of complicated calculus of mutual accountability?

For the Fall issue of Public Culture, we invite comments from readers on the many issues raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses, such as the historical bracketing out of religion from the bourgeois public sphere, the possibility of radical changes in the nature of democracy, the global portability of fiction in a postcolonial era, the politics of global diasporas and global fundamentalisms, and the unfortunate saving of the Muslim world from seriousness in the West.

Well we may ask: is there a paradigm change here that finally announces our entry into a postcolonial world and that marks modernity as a completed project?