The Hindu : National : Rushdie and the mighty pen

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 11, 2004

National

National

Rushdie and the mighty pen

By Marcus Dam

KOLKATA, DEC. 10. Salman Rushdie thinks it "would be nice" if India changes its views on the proscription of his Satanic Verses though "the threat [of the fatwa] has been pushed away and defeated."

"The fact is that there was an attempt to suppress a writer and a piece of work" but though the former does not quite apply with regard to this country, the latter still does.

"All that one can do is to try and continue to argue for what one values... and even though I do not have answers to the problems of the world what I do have [in me] is the fight against attempts to impose violence on ideas." "My advice to you is, don't mess with novelists... the pen is mightier than the sword," the Booker of Bookers Prize winner, 1993, who thinks that "the American Government is not going about things intelligently" said at a talk show here last evening.

What is he now planning to work on? "I have a great interest in the character of Machiavelli — not only because of his political thought and literary production but also the moment he lived in... the High Renaissance period when the contemporary idea of the individual was being forged." He has been seized by the idea "for more than 10 years now," said Rushdie, who is still thankful for the "kind of validation" he got from readers of Midnight's Children which has for him as a writer "probably been the most important thing." "As I have gone on, the subject of clarity [in the novel] has become more important to me...I want to write in ways that minimise obstacles for the reader without turning out a banality," the novelist said, recalling Satanic Verses as one that has "out of all my books been at the centre of the argument about difficulty." "It was assumed to have a point of view but the text constantly contradicts that point of view," he said.

Is the novel about to die? "The short answer is no; the death of the novel has been prophesised since the birth of the novel but the novel will outlive all of us," Rushdie said. In a different context he remarked, "... the great thing about literature is that there are questions hanging there that don't need to be answered... [what matters] is the importance of the question."

On the contemporary world and literature, he finds that "the new subject emerging is the question of the shrinking world... the story of everywhere being one of everywhere else."

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