Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly the stories fell away from them, the stories were packed away in boxes in the attic, and it became harder for the former children to tell and receive stories, harder for them, sadly, to fall in love. For some of them, stories began to seem irrelevant, unnecessary: kids’ stuff. These were sad people, and we must pity them and try not to think of them as stupid boring philistine losers. I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of

the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. As adults, falling in love less easily, we may end up with only a handful of books that we can truly say we love. Maybe this is why we make so many bad judgments.

It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are. I grew up in Bombay, India, a city that is no longer, today, at all like the city it once was and has even changed its name to the much less euphonious Mumbai, in a time so unlike the present that it feels impossibly remote, even fantastic: a real-life version of the mythic golden age.

This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.

Art does not die when the artist dies, said Orpheus’s head. The song survives the singer. And the shirt of Nessus warned us that even a very special gift may be dangerous. Another such gift, of course, was the Trojan horse, which taught us all to fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts. Some metaphors of the wonder tales of the West have managed to survive.

Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant “city-born” and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet. Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father’s will, on taking her place in the procession into the king’s deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.

For me, the fantastic has been a way of adding dimensions to the real, adding fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh dimensions to the usual three; a way of enriching and intensifying our experience of the real, rather than escaping from it into superhero-vampire fantasyland.

Many young writers today seem to start with the mantra “write what you know” pinned to the wall behind their writing tables, and as a result, as anyone who has experienced creative-writing classes can testify, there’s a lot of stuff about adolescent suburban angst. My advice would be a little different. Only write what you know if what you know is really interesting.

Don’t go back where you’ve already been. Find another reason for going somewhere else.

If the realist tradition has been the dominant one, it is worth spending a few moments to defend the alternative, the other great tradition. It is worth saying that fantasy is not whimsy. The fantastic is neither innocent nor escapist. The wonderland is not a place of refuge, not even necessarily an attractive or likable place. It can be—in fact, it usually is—a place of slaughter, exploitation, cruelty, and fear. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a tragedy. Captain Hook wants to kill Peter Pan. The witch in the Black Forest wants to cook Hansel and Gretel. The wolf actually eats Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Albus Dumbledore is murdered, and the Lord of the Rings plans the enslavement of the whole of Middle-earth. The flying carpet of King Solomon, which, according to the stories, was sixty miles long and sixty miles wide, once punished the great king for the sin of pride by beginning to shake, so that the forty thousand people upon it all tumbled to their deaths. (Not for the first time, ordinary people suffered for their rulers’ sins. Wonderland can be as flawed a place as earth.) We know, when we hear these tales, that even though they are “unreal,” because carpets do not fly and witches in gingerbread houses do not exist, they are also “real,” because they are about real things: love, hatred, fear, power, bravery, cowardice, death. They simply arrive at the real by a different route. They are so, even though we know that they are not so.

It gives one a sense of historical perspective, does it not, it adds to one’s understanding of the human condition, when one knows we’re only here because of a hungry cow.

In much of the world, the closing of this gap shapes people’s lives from their early childhood. One could say that for many human beings childhood itself has been abolished, “childhood” defined as a safe, protected period during which a human being can grow, learn, develop, play, and become; in which a human being can be childlike, childish, and be spared the rigors of adulthood. These days, global poverty forces children to work, in factories, in fields, on city streets. It turns children into street urchins, criminals, and whores. Meanwhile, political instability not only claims children’s lives in large numbers in Sudan, in Rwanda, in India, in Iraq, but it turns them into killers too. See on TV the child soldiers of Africa toting their automatic weapons and speaking with terrifying ease about death. In a time when the external pressures upon us are so great, in Palestine, in Israel, in Afghanistan, in Iran, many artists have felt obliged to take into account the terrible truth that for a great majority of the world’s population, their characters, strong or weak, have very little chance of determining their fates. Poverty is destiny, war is destiny, ancient ethnic, tribal, and religious hatreds are destiny, a bomb on a bus or in a market square is destiny, and character just has to take its place in the list. A billionaire financial speculator attacks your country’s currency, and it collapses, and you lose your job; it doesn’t matter who you are or how good a worker you...

These are the four roots of the self: language, place, community, custom.

To become a writer, one must first understand oneself, and it’s harder to reach that understanding when your self is spread across the world.

The dream of becoming a writer is a little like that childhood dream. To achieve your dream you leave your safe place, in which you feel confident and protected, and you fly out into the world and you begin to lose height. If you are unlucky you land, as flightless as a dodo, in a crowd of unsympathetic strangers, and your dream turns out to be a nightmare. But if you’re lucky and determined, the dream recurs, and gradually you discover you don’t need the protection of your bedroom to stay up in the air and you can fly out through the window without feeling endangered. You no longer lose height or control. You navigate through the bright and buoyant air. Maybe you soar. But once you have found your wings, however long it takes, however many times you have failed before you found them, once you have found your wings, you fly.

It may be impossible to stop wars, just as it’s impossible to stop glaciers, but it’s still worth finding the form and the language that reminds us what they are. It’s worth calling them by their true names. That is what realism is.

More than fifty years after its first publication, seventy-four years after Kurt Vonnegut was inside Slaughterhouse-Five during the firebombing of Dresden, what does his great novel have to say to us? It doesn’t tell us how to stop wars. It tells us that wars are hell, but we knew that already. It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information. It tells us that human nature is the one great constant of life on earth, and it beautifully and truthfully shows us human nature neither at its best nor at its worst but how it mostly is, most of the time, even when the times are terrible.

It is the thing that speaks. A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender.

Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look at the pages they left behind, the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable, shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time. They are both protean, shape-shifting writers, and they are both self-conscious, modern in a way that most of the modern masters would recognize, the one creating plays that are highly aware of their theatricality, of being staged, the other creating fiction that is acutely conscious of its fictive nature, even to the point of inventing an imaginary narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli—a narrator, interestingly, with Arab antecedents. And they are both as fond of, and as adept at, lowlife as they are of high ideas, and their galleries of rascals, whores, cutpurses, and drunks would be at home in the same taverns. This earthiness is what reveals them both to be realists in the grand manner, even when they are posing as fantasists, and so, again, we who come after can learn from them both that magic is pointless except when in the service of realism—was there ever a more realist magician than Prospero?—and realism can do with the injection of a healthy dose of the fabulist. Finally, though they both use tropes that originate in folktale, myth, and fable, they refuse to moralize, and in this above all els...

This is the trouble with the term “magic realism”—that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.” But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy—writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has affect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works.

If you aren’t a writer, don’t worry: This book won’t teach you how to be one. If you are a writer, I suspect it will teach you a lot. Either way, it’s a treasure chest, and a delight.

“How autobiographical is it?” As it happens, there is a right and a wrong answer to this question. The wrong answer first: “It’s not really autobiographical. I suppose there are bits of me in there, bits of things that really happened, but they’ve all been changed around and jumbled up with other things that I just made up, and there are bits of people I know, but they are all mixed up with other bits I invented. You know, it’s fiction?” This answer has the merit of usually being true, but it is still the wrong answer. The right answer is: “It’s completely autobiographical. Yes! Everything in this novel happened either to me or to close friends or family members!” Only this answer will satisfy, and even impress, the person asking the question. Only this answer will allow you to move past the autobiography question to other, arguably more interesting questions about the work itself.

And it’s even stranger than that, because while the divine population is presumably reasonably stable—one assumes divine birth control to be better than the human variety—the human population has been growing at high speed; in fact it has more than doubled since I was at school in Bombay in the 1950s. So if we project that population curve backward, we see that it was probably only sometime in the 1930s that the human population of India grew larger than the divine population for the first time. What does it do to a writer’s sensibility and his artistic imagination to grow up in a world in which the supernatural and the quotidian rub up against each other in approximately equal numbers? What does it do to his understanding of the word “realism”? In my case, the answer is that it liberated me, showing me early on that kitchen-sink naturalism is only one way, and perhaps quite a limited way, of describing the world. This realization was a part of what I call “the given.” All writers start out with a “given,” some little or large nugget of good or bad feeling, funny-ha-ha or funny-peculiar stories, some little moral or sexual twistedness, some unexpected angle on the language, some unscratched itch that makes them want to write in the first place. Some writers are able to mine that seam for a lifetime. Others—most of us, I believe—eventually feel that we have exhausted what we started out with and have to find a second act.

Self-regard has never been so well regarded. Self-exposure has never been so popular, and the more self that is exposed the better. Amid such promiscuity of revelation, how can art compete? How can truth fail to be stranger than fiction?

The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act; how to make a second version of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its own new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your mango or lime, originally were. Is it impossible? Is the intangible in our arts and our natures, the space between our words, the things seen in between the things shown, inevitably discarded in the remaking process, and if so can it be filled up with other spaces, other visions, that satisfy or even enrich us enough so that we do not mind the loss? To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential, in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives.

We can learn this much from the poets who translate the poetry of others, from the screenwriters and filmmakers who turn words on the page into images on a screen, from all those who carry across one thing into another state: An adaptation works best when it is a genuine transaction between the old and the new, carried out by persons who understand and care for both, who can help the thing adapted to leap the gulf and shine again in a different light. In other words, the process of social, cultural, and individual adaptation, just like artistic adaptation, needs to be free, not rigid, if it is to succeed. Those who cling too fiercely to the old text, the thing to be adapted, the old ways, the past, are doomed to produce something that does not work, an unhappiness, an alienation, a quarrel, a failure, a loss. But those who do not know who they are are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others; comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humorless world; serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humorless; people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new country, who act against their natures because they think that’s the way to make things easy for themselves. Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under ...

Human nature is contradictory, and the human self is a capacious and multiform thing. We can be, we are, many selves at once: We can be gentle with our children but harsh with our employees; we can love God but dislike human beings; we can fear for the environment and yet leave electric lights on when we leave the house; we can be peaceful souls who are driven, by our passion for a football team, to aggressive, sometimes even hooligan extremes. And no matter how strongly we may wish to defend the sovereignty of the individual self—an idea born in the Florentine Renaissance that may be Italy’s greatest gift to world civilization—that self is, in reality, simultaneously sovereign and invaded by other selves. It is at once autonomous and not autonomous. None of us comes into the world empty-handed. We carry with us the baggage of our inheritance, both biological and cultural, and that inheritance both limits and enables us, both cripples and liberates. We may think of ourselves as free to choose and morally responsible for our choices, and it is right that we should so understand ourselves, but the way in which we frame those choices, and indeed the particular choices we feel we have to make, are not only ours to determine.

Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction, and in our novels and poems we sing our human complexity, our ability to be, simultaneously, both yes and no, both this and that, without feeling the slightest discomfort. The Arabic equivalent of the formula “once upon a time” is kan ma kan, which translates “It was so, it was not so.” This great paradox lies at the heart of all fiction. Fiction is precisely that place where things are both so and not so, where worlds exist in which we can profoundly believe while also knowing that they do not, have not, and will never exist. And in our age of oversimplification, this beautiful complication has never been more important.

History is not written in stone. The past is constantly revised according to the attitudes of the present.

In Germany after World War II, the authors of what was called Trümmerliteratur, “rubble literature,” felt the need to rebuild their language, poisoned by Nazism, as well as their country, which lay in ruins. They understood that reality, truth, needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, with new language, just as the bombed cities needed to be rebuilt. I think we can learn from their example. We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of the 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. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.

We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage, the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures. A firefighter runs toward a burning building while others flee it: We readily salute his bravery, as we do that of servicemen returning from the battlefront, or men and women struggling to overcome debilitating illnesses or injuries.

In America, if you dismiss religion from a lecture podium, you often hear noises of shock: gasps, sharp intakes of breath. In America, you can’t get elected dogcatcher if you can’t prove that you go to church every Sunday and have a close relationship with the priest there. (Just to be clear, not that close. He probably prefers younger people anyway.)

I did, however, come away wondering why, in the Land of the Free, people were everywhere imprisoned by the antique ideology called God. Here is the explanation, the two-dollar theory I came up with. It has a lot to do with the way people think about freedom. In Europe, the battle for freedom of thought and expression was fought against the Church more than the state. The Church, with its apparatus of oppression—excommunication, anathema, the Index Expurgatorius, torture, the drowning of witches, the dismemberment or burning of dissidents—was in the business of placing limiting points upon what could be thought and said, and if you crossed those frontiers you might, like Giordano Bruno, like Savonarola, find yourself being burned at the stake or, at the very least, being forced, like Galileo, to recant what you knew to be true. So in European thought, “freedom” came to be understood as “freedom from religion.” The writers and philosophers of the French Enlightenment understood this very well, made it their business to erode the power of the Church to silence expression, using blasphemy as one of their weapons, and it’s their work that ended up being the cornerstone of our modern ideas about liberty.

This sounds like old-fashioned parenting. When we are born, we understand very little, and we need a great deal. Before we have language, we need protection and care. As we grow up, we turn toward our protectors, if we are lucky enough to have protectors, and we look to them for the laws by which we must live. All children push against parental boundaries, but all children need to know where the boundaries are. We bask in the approval of our parents and we fear their disapproval. They are like gods to us. Until they’re not. Growing up is our first experience of the phenomenon of liberty, for which another term might be “thinking for oneself.” At a certain point we all begin to formulate our own picture of the world, and if it is at odds with the picture our parents made for us, then very often we discard the old picture in favor of the new one, and if this causes problems between ourselves and our parents, then we have to face those problems. (Or run away from them.) The gods cease to be gods, and we begin to be autonomous beings.

Outgrowing the gods is the birth of individual and social liberty.

Liberty relies on the constant interrogation of any ethical system’s first principles. When one is not allowed to question the first principles of the dominant system of thought, and when the penalties for doing so are dire, one finds oneself trapped in a tyranny. This problem is not unique to religions. The penalties for questioning Stalinism then and the Chinese regime now were and are brutal and severe. But religion adds a twist to the tale by claiming unarguable authority from this or that divine source and arguing, further, that without such a supreme arbiter to establish right and wrong, it is impossible to lead an ethical life. Thus atheists are by definition amoral. This point of view is widespread in the Islamic world today, and by no means only among fanatics.

We live in the age of an unprecedented attack on truth itself, in which deliberate lies are masked by the accusation that those who would unmask them are the liars. We live in the age of the world turned upside down. The lunatics are running the asylum. This is a time that poses a great test of the notions of free expression for which I’ve been arguing. But in the end I’ll hold to my position. I have nothing but admiration for the diligence with which the news media, under ferocious attack, have held to a vital idea—that the truth is the truth and lies are lies—and have continued to do their work. If these are the enemies of the people, then I am happy to be named among them, for the truth is that the truth, and its tellers, are the people’s greatest friends.

The power of orthodoxy has not diminished. Governments still routinely accuse their opponents of lacking patriotism, religious leaders are quick to anathematize their critics, corporations dislike whistleblowers and mavericks, the range of ideas available through the mass media diminishes all the time. Yet right and wrong, good and evil, are not determined by power, or by adherence to this or that interest group. The struggle to know how to act for the best is a struggle that never ceases. Don’t follow leaders. Look, instead, for the oddballs who insist on marching out of step. Thank you for listening, and good luck to you all.

Try not to be small. Try to be larger than life.

Plunge in. Dive into the deep end. Sink or swim. Well, if possible, don’t sink. If you learned anything at Emory, you should have learned how to stay afloat. The world is full of siren songs luring unwary sailors onto rocks; false promises, fool’s gold; foxes, cats, and coachmen luring young people to gluttonous, overindulging Pleasure Island, where, as you’ll know if you’ve seen the movie of Pinocchio, the kids make jackasses of themselves. Do not make jackasses of yourselves.

We thought of ourselves, my lot, as tolerant and progressive, and we are leaving you an intolerant and retrogressive world. But it’s a resilient place, the world, and its beauty is still breathtaking, its potential still astonishing, and as for the mess we’ve made, you can change it, and I believe you’re going to. I have a suspicion you’re better than us, you care more for the planet, you’re less bigoted, more tolerant, and your ideals may hold up better than ours did. Make no mistake. You can change things. Don’t believe anyone who tells you you can’t. Here’s how to do it. Question everything. Take nothing for granted. Argue with all received ideas. Don’t respect what doesn’t deserve respect. Speak your mind. Don’t censor yourselves. Use your imagination. And express what it tells you to express.