RUSHDIE, (Ahmed) Salman

Nationality: British. Born: Bombay, India, 19 June 1947. Education: Cathedral School, Bombay; Rugby School, Warwickshire, 1961-65; King's College, Cambridge, 1965-68, M.A. (honors) in history 1968. Family: Married 1) Clarissa Luard in 1976 (divorced 1987), one son; 2) the writer Marianne Wiggins in 1988. Career: Worked in television in Pakistan and as actor in London, 1968-69; freelance advertising copywriter, London, 1970-81; council member, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 1985. Sentenced to death for The Satanic Verses in a religious decree (fatwa) by Ayatollah Khomeini, and forced to go into hiding, February 1989. Awards: Arts Council bursary; Booker prize, 1981; English-Speaking Union award, 1981; James Tait Black Memorial prize, 1982; Foreign Book prize (France), 1985; Whitbread prize, 1988. Member: Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1983.

Publications

Short Stories

East, West: Stories. 1994.

Uncollected Short Stories

"The Free Radio," in Firebird 1, edited by T. J. Binding. 1982.

"The Prophet's Hair," in The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by Malcolm Bradbury. 1987.

"Good Advice Is Rarer than Rubies," in New Yorker, 22 June 1987. "Untime of the Imam," in Harper's (New York), December 1988.

Novels

Grimus. 1975.

Midnight's Children. 1981.

Shame. 1983.

The Satanic Verses. 1988.

The Moor's Last Sigh. 1997.

Fiction (for children)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories. 1990.

Plays

Television Writing: The Painter and the Pest, 1985; The Riddle of Midnight, 1988.

Other

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. 1987.

Is Nothing Sacred? (lecture). 1990.

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. 1991.

The Wizard of Oz. 1992.

The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write. 1993.

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Bibliography:

The Salman Rushdie Bibliography: A Bibliography of Salman Rushdie's Work and Rushdie Criticism, 1997.

Critical Studies:

New Jerusalems: Reflections on Islam, Fundamentalism and the Rushdie Affair by Daniel Easterman, 1993; Salman's End: Exposing the Absurdity of the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie by Isfendiyar Halil Eralp, 1993; Answer to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses by Yunus Khan, 1995; Unending Meta-morphoses: Myth, Satire and Religion in Salman Rushdie's Novels by Margareta Petersson, 1996; Salman Rushdie by Catherine Cundy, 1996; Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse in the Novels of Yom Sang-sop, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie by Soonsik Kim, 1996; Place of the Sacred: The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair by Joel Kuortti, 1997; Salman Rushdie by D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, 1998.

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Both in his life and in his fiction, Salman Rushdie seems to embody what Homi Bhabha has described as the hybridity that "terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery." He exhibits the indeterminacy of a diaspora-like identity, abjuring the negative connotations of displacement and dislocation in his positive assertion of a new, plural, and eclectic identity. His life has been a perpetual osmosis of black and white, Muslim and Hindu, Islamic faith and European skepticism, and Eastern myth and Western postmodernism. His literary influences yield a similar percolation. On the one hand there are the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, Bollywood, the Koran, and The Arabian Nights' Entertainment. On the other are the avant-garde cinema, surrealism, magical realism and postmodernism, and English journalism and copywriting. Underlying all of these intertextual influences is the migrant's obsession with language, whose stories operate on one level as a contestation of colonial authority in itself:

Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it … perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles … To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.

In its re-creation of the magical realm of childhood, the first of his two collections of stories, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), was written partly for his son. Yet, through the guise of an episodic narrative for children, Rushdie coalesces debates about freedom of expression and the liberty of the artistic imagination. It is pertinent that he did so one year after the fatwa of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forced him into hiding over The Satanic Verses. Haroun rekindles the fear that pervades much of Rushdie's work, the drying up of the sources of the imagination in a storyteller. The main task facing Haroun is the cleansing and release of the Oceans of the Streams of Story, which, like the sources of stories within his father Rashid, is in imminent danger of drought. This is due to the evil plans of Khattam-Shud, a Hindi name meaning "completely finished," here representative of the malign figure's desire to impose silence upon free expression, imaginative or otherwise. The political unconscious of the stories draws an all too obvious allegorical parallel between Khattam-Shud and his Chupwala army with Khomeini and the forces of Islamic fundamentalism. The ocean, which is the subject of Haroun's quest, is visualized as a literal sea of fiction, "in fact the biggest library in the Universe," and is awash with both old and new stories. Indeed, as the Water Genie says, "No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new." The reciprocal relationship between fiction and reality and perhaps between history and literature, the world and art, is questioned by Haroun's desire not merely to "unplug" the ocean but also to cleanse and purify it from dross and pollutants.

In East, West (1994) Rushdie claimed that he wished "to develop a form of fiction in which the miraculous might co-exist with the mundane." This is a world in which Indian boys in Kensington sing Neil Sedaka songs to baby girls called Scheherazade and in which diplomats from Asia play out Star Trek fantasies. It is a world in which Indians from Cambridge learn about gurus from mad Englishmen, Jimmy Greaves meets Fred Flintstone, and everyone from terrorists to movie stars comes to the auction of the Ruby Slippers in a wish-fulfilling dream of home. Each of the three stories of the opening "East" section consecutively juxtaposes concepts of dream and reality concerning wisdom, love, and religion. The "West" section follows a similar pattern, only the themes this time are myth, home, and quest. The ways in which people use fiction, how it can redeem or deceive us, are replayed and refracted before coming together in the three stories of the final section. In "The Harmony of the Spheres" constructing fictional identities turns from a harmless pastime into tragedy. Mala constructs a Khan who is a "visitor from Xanadu," Khan constructs an Eliot who is a "keeper of forbidden knowledge," and Eliot cuckolds Khan while imagining him as "an invader from Mars." The marriage between Mala and Khan collapses as Eliot descends into paranoid schizophrenia and suicide, leaving the reader and narrator to wonder, "Madness. Love? Is there a difference, or is it only a matter of degree?" The story seems to illustrate Lacan's definition of "loving as giving what one does not have," although perhaps for these protagonists loving is equally desiring something that is not there. Sometimes communication between people is not possible even through the resources of fiction, and they must resort to games, as do the mute porter Mecir and the retired ayah Mary in "The Courter." For them chess had become their "private language." In Mecir's case it retains "much of the articulacy and subtlety which had vanished from his speech," while for Mary "it is like going with him to his country."

Despite superficial dissimilarities, the concerns of East, West are not very different from those that inspired Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In both Rushdie asserts the value of the inextricable link between fiction and reality and the value of literature as "the one place … we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way." His hybrid stories are artistic productions that, like the artist himself, are products of colonialism and exemplars of postcolonialism. They simultaneously display their indebtedness to many diverse cultural forms and their own originality.

—Simon Baker

See the essay on "Good Advice Is Rarer than Rubies."

SACASTRU, Martín. See BIOY CASARES, Adolfo.