Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

In some later versions of the Ramayana, the exiled Lord Ram and his brother Lakshman leave Sita alone in their forest dwelling one day while they hunt a golden deer, not knowing that the deer is actually a rakshasa, a kind of demon, in disguise. To protect Sita in their absence, Lakshman draws a rekha, or an enchanted line, around their home; anyone who tries to cross it except Ram, Lakshman, and Sita will be burned to death by flames that erupt from the line. But the demon king Ravana disguises himself as a beggar and comes to Sita’s door asking for alms, and she crosses the line to give him what he wants. This is how he captures her and spirits her away to his kingdom of Lanka, after which Ram and Lakshman have to fight a war to get her back. To “cross the Lakshman rekha” has become a metaphor for overstepping the boundaries of what is permissible or right, of going too far, of succumbing foolishly to iconoclasm, and bringing down upon yourself dire consequences.

And I began to remember the stories that had made me fall in love with literature in the first place, tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true.

The collection known in India as the Panchatantra features a pair of talking jackals: Karataka, the good or better guy of the two, and Damanaka, the wicked schemer. At the book’s outset they are in the service of the lion king, but Damanaka doesn’t like the lion’s friendship with another courtier, a bull, and tricks the lion into believing the bull to be an enemy. The lion murders the innocent animal while the jackals watch. The end.

oh boy. Have seen this play out in reality.

In a third story a man leaves his child in the care of his friend, a mongoose, and when he returns he sees blood on the mongoose’s mouth and kills it, believing it has attacked his child. Then he discovers the mongoose has actually killed a snake and saved his child. But by now the mongoose is unfortunately deceased. The end.

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

The literature of the fantastic—the wonder tale, the fable, the folktale, the magic-realist novel—has always embodied profound truths about human beings, their finest attributes and their deepest prejudices too: about, to take just one example, women.

if the wind changes, if the public mood shifts, the same people who venerated you as a saint yesterday can come to burn you tomorrow, as the example of Saint Joan of Arc demonstrates.

the greed of the fisherman’s wife in the Grimm story, culminating in her demand that she be made pope, which undoes the miracle of untold wealth granted to the fisherman by the talking flounder whose life he once spared. Everything vanishes—the palace, the jewels, the gold—and the fisherman and his wife are returned to the hovel (actually, the word used in the Grimm tale is “pisspot”) in which they formerly lived.

The wonder tale tells us truths about ourselves that are often unpalatable; it exposes bigotry, explores the libido, brings our deepest fears to light.

Now, the fictionality of fiction is an important matter; it lies at the heart of the transaction, the contract, between the work and its audience, the work confessing its untruth while promising to uncover truth, the audience suspending its disbelief in what it knows is not to be believed and so discovering material that is worth believing in.

So inside any given “reality,” a given picture of the world, there will be a number of nailed-down facts—the name of the president, the age of your spouse, the place occupied by your favorite sports team in the weekly standings—but there will also, often, be nailed-down fictions—common prejudices, ignorances, mistakes, and items of state propaganda (which comes these days in a range of attractive colors)—masquerading as facts.

We can’t even agree about the Yankees’ starting rotation, how are we going to agree about the world?

Here’s this world we have, not flat, not anymore, we know that, but can we agree what it actually is? Round, okay, it’s roundish, but beyond that? More and more it’s a place where people argue, where they don’t agree, where one man’s liberation is another man’s imperialism, where battle lines are drawn in the sand, across glaciers, through the hearts of broken cities, where a great dispute is in progress about the nature of reality, about what is the case; there are worlds in collision, incompatible realities fighting for the same space, and the result, often, is violence.

In a world as unstable as this, give me literary instability every time, or at least some recognition of it, some recognition of how the world can be rocked by earthquakes, war, or chance, where there’s no mistake about reality, where there’s a facing up to the nature of the beast.

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.

the idea of the protean is the foundation of what I’m calling the other great tradition, the one that isn’t trapped in a mistake about the real, the mistake being to see the real as ordinary when in fact it’s extraordinary, to see it as moderate when in fact it’s extreme, to see it not as it is, which is to say full of wonderments, but as merely naturalistic instead.

If one clings to the idea of the protean, one will avoid all these mistakes and understand further that realism in the novel is not a question of following certain rules, that it has nothing to do with naturalism or mimicry, a novel not being like a photograph but more like an oil painting, or possibly in the case of the best novels a great fresco covering the walls and ceiling of a mighty palace, and so realism in the novel isn’t a question of technique; it is, in my opinion, a question of intention.

if the intention of the artist, the writer, is to make as true and honest a response to the world as he can, if it be his intention to use the best powers of language and imagination to create a vision arising out of his sense of what it is to be alive in the world, and if he be faithful to that intention, then what he makes will be a work of realism, whether it be filled with dragons and broomsticks or with kitchen sinks and offices. Van Gogh’s painting of a starry night doesn’t look like a photograph of a starry night or, indeed, what a starry n...

“Stupidity is better kept a secret than displayed.”

in plainer language, that a man’s character is his fate. “Character is destiny.”

The migrant too is at first a tree standing without roots, trying not to fall. Migration is an existential act, stripping us of our defenses, mercilessly exposing us to a world that understands us badly, if at all: as if the earth were stripped of its atmosphere and the sun were to bear down upon it in all its pitiless force.

such writers, instability is a given—instability of abode, of the future, of the family, of the self. For such writers, the lack of an automatic subject is a given too. Some, like the longtime Somali exile Nuruddin Farah, carry their homeland within them, just as Joyce carried Dublin with him, and never turn to other places or other themes. Others, like the diaspora Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee, redefine themselves according to their changed circumstances—in her case, thinking and writing as an American. Others, like myself, fall somewhere in between, sometimes looking East, sometimes West, but always with a sense of the provisionality of all truths, the mutability of all character, the uncertainty of all times and places, no matter how settled things may seem.

The migrant has no ground to stand on until he invents it. This too increases his sense of the precariousness of all things and leads him toward a literature of precariousness, in which neither destiny nor character can be taken for granted, nor can their relationship.

Life rarely turns out in the way the living hope for, and “so it goes” has become one of the ways in which we verbally shrug our shoulders and accept what life gives us. But that is not its purpose in Slaughterhouse-Five. “So it goes” is not a way of accepting life but of facing death. It occurs in the text every single time someone dies, and only when someone dies.

And the arrival of the first railway train drives at least one woman mad with fear. “It’s coming,” she cries. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind

The story demonstrates Pinter’s legendary intransigence and his dislike of being asked to explain his work. For him, the strength of a work of art lay in its resistance to the idea of “meaning,” or at least in the reduction of meaning to a plain verbal explanation of what a scene, or a play, or a poem, or a novel, was “about.”

A word I dislike, “Islamophobia,” has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labeling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side. And in the second place, it’s important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims. The Taliban oppressed the people of Afghanistan and are on the verge of returning to do so again; the ayatollahs continue to oppress the people of Iran; the people who died in the Iraq War are almost all Muslims, killed by other Muslims in the name of their own religion, re-described in sectarian terms to permit their murder. It is right to feel phobia toward such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings but a whole culture. To feel aversion toward such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.

Like Harold Pinter, I greatly prefer the artist’s language of ambiguity and indirection, which allows a work to have many readings. But also, following Harold’s lead, I can’t, as a citizen, avoid speaking of the horror of the world in this new age of religious mayhem, and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it, so that young men, including young Britons, are led toward acts of extreme bestiality and believe themselves to be fighting a just war.

Bellow was fascinated by what he called “reality instructors,” Deepak Chopra–like gurus, or what Alfred Kazin defined as “the very personification[s] of a kind of modern urban know-it-all, the quack analyst, the false guide to the many afflicted by their terrible uncertainty.”

Not to know the difference between a metaphor and a lie is one definition of insanity.

In Martin Amis’s 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, the story of the Holocaust is told in reverse, so that, in one extraordinary scene, kindly Nazi doctors in a concentration camp fetch gold from their private hoards and use it to put fillings into the teeth of Jewish dental patients. But in Time’s Arrow everything, and not just one single life, goes backward.

their finch-ness, their essence, was intact. As individuals, as communities, as nations, we are the constant adapters of ourselves and must constantly ask ourselves the question. Wherein does our finch-ness lie, so to speak: Of what does our essence consist; what are the things we cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves? We move to a new city, a new country; we find ourselves among people we do not know, who do not know us.

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 attack. Claiming to defend freedom, they can make themselves and others less free. Or, seeking to calm the violent hotheads in their midst, societies can try to appease them and so give the violent hotheads the notion that their violence and hotheadedness is effective. Wishing to create better understanding between peoples, they can seek to prevent the expression of opinions unpalatable to some of their members and so immediately make others even angrier than they were before.

As the old sailor Singleton says in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” “Ships are all right. It is the men in them.”

There are great social benefits in such broad definitions of the self, for the more selves we find within ourselves, the easier it is to find common ground with other multiple, multitude-containing selves. We may have different religious beliefs but support the same team. Yet we live in an age in which we are urged to define ourselves more and more narrowly, to crush our own multidimensionality into the straitjacket of a one-dimensional national, ethnic, tribal, or religious identity. This, I have come to think, may be the evil from which flow all the other evils of our time. For when we succumb to this narrowing, when we allow ourselves to be simplified and become merely Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Hindus, then it becomes easy for us to see each other as adversaries, as one another’s Others, and the very points of the compass begin to quarrel, East and West collide, and North and South as well.

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.

Democracy is not polite. It’s often a shouting match in a public square.

when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.

Crisis shines a very bright light on human behavior, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures as well.

remembered Toni Morrison saying, “White people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it,” and “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees—then you have a serious problem.” And in the eyes and faces of the protesters—some masked, some not—I saw a determination that said, “This time it’s different.”