There are people who know Rushdie as the most charismatic writer of Indian Writing in English, as the author of Midnight’s Children and who recently authored Victory City. Then, there are far more people who know Rushdie as the writer of the controversial, banned novel Satanic Verses for which a fatwa (death warrant) was issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. And then there are probably more people who vaguely know him as the stabbed writer, who survived a brutal knife attack, for something objectionable that he might have written against Islam or its prophet.
Rushdie is one of the rare writers who survived a vicious knife attack that cost him an eye and wrote a memoir of his days of recovery in which he contemplates death, death of an author, life of an assassin, bigotry in our times, survival of hope in humanity and most importantly, love.
I generally underline a lot, while reading a book, and scribble notes on the margins. I could not do the same while reading knife, because the book seemed to me the injured body of Rushdie, that needs to be handled carefully. This book review is, however, a diagnostic report, and it can afford to be dispassionate.
Knife is not a lengthy text, at 209 pages. Still, it blends a variety of things together. At its core, there is an autobiographical story of brave survival from a deadly knife attack. But it is also a love story in parts, between Rushdie and his wife Eliza.
There is also a hate story of sorts, where Rushdie produces an imaginary interrogation session of his assassin carried out by him. Death looms large throughout of this memoir, not just the fear, but actual deaths of authors to which the memoir stands witness. Rushdie recounts the 1982 incident of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (later a Novel Laureate in literature) being stabbed by Islamist radicals which seamlessly blends with his own fate. He remembers Samuel Beckett being stabbed, and in a way this memoir becomes a literary account of the mortal perils often faced by writers.
During my student days in Kolkata during the zero decade, a particular thesis of Structuralist/Post-Structuralist thinkers was rather popular among the faculties teaching us at Jadavpur University’s Department of English, it was called ‘death of the author” (there is an eponymous article by Roland Barthes). That death is completely metaphorical though, nothing to do with death or death-like situations of writers in a biological sense. It emphasises on a text’s autonomy and asserts a text’s freedom from authorial control and context. But then I came across another book titled The Death and Return of the Author, that argued in favour of a Historicist/New Historicist case in which the text must include authorial background, context, history. I liked the return, and did not believe that author can be dead.
“Death of the author” is a discredited thesis in literary theory now anyway, somewhat like Fukuyama’s “End of History” hypothesis which stands discarded as well.
Rushdie’s Knife can read like a symbolic return of the author from the dead. Even when an author is dead, like a British monarch, s/he lives long – this seems to be the underlying sentiment in Rushdie’s memoir. Almost like Freud’s return of the repressed, the author proves too recalcitrant to the silencing attempts of the draconian forces of repression. The author fights back and comes back.
Probably this is the reason why the love story of two writers, Salman and Eliza is foregrounded in Knife, not only because love and marriage stand for the pursuit of happiness that contrasts with the grim shadow of death. Eros stands in stark contrast to thanos. Often love is what is repressed by the social consciousness, and the repressed author in his symbolic return from the dead might do as well celebrate love.
In Shakespeare, tragedies end in deaths and comedies end in marriages, as a general rule of thumb. This memoir ends with Salman’s call to Eliza, “Let’s go home”. This is a happy, convivial ending.
But Rushdie’s book also shows the human limitations of an otherwise metaphysically transcendental authorship. In Knife the usual magic realism for which Rushdie’s style is known is completely absent. The imaginary interrogation of the assassin (simply called A.) could have been an interesting point of intersection between reality and surreality, and Rushdie himself acknowledges the inherent potential of “sheer surrealism” in the “extraordinary” and “unreal” situation, what he calls the “Samuel Beckett moment” (Beckett was stabbed and later faced his assaulter inside the courtroom) when the author encounters the assassin.
But Rushdie does not attempt that, and that probably shows the normal human boundaries. He cannot produce a rich tapestry out of his stabber’s characterization. The sketch of the assassin in the account of the imaginary interrogation frequently collapses into a two-dimensional squib, while Rushdie acknowledges that this is all happening inside his brain.
Now, may be this is deliberate, so as the create a Brechtian alienation, where we realise that the two-dinensionality is an intentional feature of the imaginary construct. But such deliberate weakness might not do justice to the portrait of a fanatic killer, or the multi-layered nature of an imaginary encounter between the stabber and the author.
This is not just important from a literary perspective. Freud once reportedly observed this about the literary writers: they’ve said it all, much before all the theorists and analysts. I am paraphrasing here what Freud said about the deep insights of Greek tragedy about the human condition.
Rushdie therefore had a heavy Freudian responsibility, to which he has not done justice. If only he could show us inside the mind of a terrorist in a world menaced by acts of radical terrorism, it would have been not just a diagnosis, but who knows, may be the remedy itself. Instead, Rushdie has produced a series of verbose cliches in the name of this imaginary encounter.
May be this is a human limitation! When you are struck in flesh and blood, it may not be possible to make a literary masterpiece out of the striker’s character. Rushdie haughtily dismisses this fanatic as an example of a life unexamined, but such lives need to be studied under our careful scrutiny all the more, if we are to understand our human conditions, and not just the present one.
How I wish Rushdie’s memoir could have given a voice to the unspoken K. of the knife. Yes, that would be Kafkaesque. What if the knife of the radical assassin could come to life through a rhetorical device of personification? One who witnessed the making of a radical terrorist? Or what if the assassin could himself turn to this knife of Islam? We need to know what dark and dangerous game is going on there, and who can tell us better than a writer?
John Keats, the great Romantic poet, came up with the notion of negative capability when he spoke about Shakespeare’s strange skill which could create a rich character without imposing any authorial judgment. This is often invoked as the masterly ability which Shakespeare had in creating rich and complex characters, Shylock for example, without being judgmental. But of course, if the bard himself had to go under Shylock’s knife, we do not know how he would have responded to such a villain!
Knife is also a defence of literature in a very ancient vein, as writers seem to bear the brunt of civilizations, seem to be banished, and therefore a defence might be in order. Such literary defences existed since Plato wanted poets to be banished from his ideal republic. Because, the idea was that poets (an umbrella term in Greece for all sorts of creative writers) lie, fabricate, produce a voodoo knowledge which is not the real thing.
The Greeks said that Poetry is imitation, i.e. mimesis. Plato’s famous theory was that literature is thrice removed from what is real. First, there is divine reality, which is supreme and faultless, but then as imperfect humans we can only have access to perceptible reality which is an imperfect shadow of divine reality, and then we have literature, which is a further shadow of the perceptible reality. Hence, thrice removed. Hence, literature is a corrupt imitation, and not the real deal.
Nobody in his right mind would argue that modern day terrorists who hate the writer of Satanic Verses as a liar who corrupted Divine Truth might have been influenced by Platonic theory! And yet, there is this strong possibility that such a line of thinking is not at all a stray aberration.
Rushdie will probably not be considered among the great thinkers of our times. He is a renowned creative writer, but not a philosopher. So, there are instances of his awkward theorisation which clutters the flow of the narrative in Knife. He thinks guns are always these monolithic killing machines while knives are far more ambivalent: knives can be both creative and destructive. But there can be myriad usage of guns for sports, sending a signal, hunting food etc. Also, we should not forget that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes used to engrave on his wall a patriotic symbol VR (Victoria Regina) by firing bullets from his pistol. Human inventions and interventions are not always simplifiable.
Rushdie’s grand narrative about a world in the grip of bigotry from New Delhi to Florida, Modi to Trump, from Iran to Russia might be a comfortable generalisation that the liberal intelligentsia can use, but there are many faultlines here. Rushdie’s portrait of mass religion as the villain begs many questions, because religion is indeed a popular culture and as Terry Eagleton says, the most important form of popular culture.
Rushdie proposes a theory of the origin of religion which is dated: he thinks religion was created by primitive humans to augment their faulty and limited understanding of their surrounding world, but that is just one of the factors behind the creation of religion. Religion was also a uniquely human attribute, something that literally separated from the rest of the animal kingdom, allowed us to create large imagined communities. According to some anthropologists the chimpanzees are in their palaeolithic era, and they are exhibiting some signs of a proto-religion, like putting some stones or other distinguished objects on the graves of the deceased.
Religion is an evolutionary phenomenon of humankind.
Religion is not just a pseudo-science used to make sense of a primitive world, as Rushdie likes to believe. It is also a form of poetry which allows us to express emotions about suffering, death and continuity of life. Religion is an important way of coming to terms with the human body. Tantra would be a case in point.
Rushdie does not show any signs of awareness about the rich theoretical works on religion and theology which have taken place in the recent decades, and is still caught in the good old secular hypothesis. Religious bigotry is an extremely dangerous problem, but the magic solution of banishing religion from all public, mass spheres, as Rushdie theorises might not be a feasible one. What will become of Bengal without Durga Puja, and what will become of Maharashtra without the Ganesh festival?
However, Rushdie does admit that religion remains important for him. He says that he uses “Hindu narrative” in his latest novel Victory City as he did a long time ago in his other Indian novel, Midnight’s Children. He admits that aesthetically he is influenced by Christianity, even though he is an atheist and is born a Muslim.
His solution for this dilemma is the good old liberal hypothesis of a private religion. The idea goes that religion is a private affair, and in the public sphere it should play no role. He enthusiastically brings up the case of India, and says that the founding father Mahatma Gandhi and his disciple Jawaharlal Nehru believed in secularism, that the Indian public sphere should be free from encumbrances from religion. Those who know Gandhi’s Ram Rajya will realise that this is not the truth. Also, the schedule of Nehru’s oath taking ceremony as the first Prime Minister was determined by Hindu Astrologers. Also, it is precisely Indian secularism which got his Satanic Verses banned. Secularism in India (all religions are to be equally celebrated – well, equality might just be an idea here) is entirely different from Western secularism (dissociation of the state from religion).
Rushdie’s memoir is weakest when he lectures, often without adequate analysis and understanding.
Rushdie might have done better in Knife only if he focussed on what a creative writer does best, if he adhered to his mettle as a creative writer. His theories are weak. His grand narratives of state bigotry versus the free individual as postulated in the example of Ovid being banished by the Roman Empire are followed by his visionary assertion that Roman empire is outlived by Ovid’s poetry. In the same way Ovid’s poetry exists as a legacy, the Roman Empire does leave its imprints and legacies within so many western establishments, someone should point that out to Rushdie.
I cannot help remembering this anecdote here. Harvard University was to hire Vladimir Nabokov, the famous writer of Lolita to teach literature. Upon hearing this news, Roman Jakobson, a great theorist belonging to the formalist school teaching in Harvard quipped: What next, hire an elephant to teach zoology?
Apologies for this anecdote. Salman Rushdie is a great writer.
But he probably can serve literature better by not being a lecturer. He should unleash the writer in him, not the theoretician. May be easier said than done, after a vicious knife attack. May be he needs his theories as a therapy during his recovery.
But honestly, his theories leave us disappointed, and his creativity in this memoir is impeded by his theories.
But at the end of the day, Knife’s saving grace is the power of literature, the power of the writers. The writer’s body of flesh and blood can be palpably real for the readers of this memoir. This book is not just about Rushdie himself, but other writers as well. Death of writers like Martin Amis, and the potential immortality of their writings loom large at the margins of this memoir.
At its core, Knife focuses on love which is contrasted with the terrorist’s lovelessness. Rushdie, a novelist, marries Eliza, a poet, and this is a happy marriage through which the language of prose is wedded to the language of poetry. There lies a great symbolic union. Literary love can redeem humankind. Freud’s praise was not an empty one. Let the writer go to those undiscovered countries, to the realms of which none has ventured before.
We wish Salman Rushdie a long, happy, safe and creative life.
Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Penguin India, New Delhi, 2024. pp209, ₹ 699.
