Finding Truth Through Art, Fiction, and Storytelling
Salman Rushdie is an incisive fiction writer, and an equally brilliant essayist. Watching him think is a masterclass in how to process reality.
We all have stories that we think about into adulthood. Whether we had steady access to books or relied on oral storytellers, each of us carries a small canon of knowledge with us.
In his collection of essays, Languages of Truth, Salman Rushdie ruminates on the power of stories. However, Rushdie’s essays aren’t inaccessibly dense. One of the great things about his writing is how connected he is with the harsh realities of the world.
For example, sex in writing should be made funny.
It’s difficult to capture the emotional and physical balance of sex in equal measure. Rushdie followed the advice he received from Philip Roth: “If you are going to write about sex, make it funny.” Rushdie is kind enough to provide a sample from one of his books, The Moor’s Last Sigh:
“He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until…phew! Boy! Over and done with!”
Goodness.
Rushdie’s essays aren’t all about his writing, though the ones that cover it are valuable for anyone who wants to see thinking in action. His best essays revolve around another piece of advice from Philip Roth, a tidbit that Rushdie has become known for:
“Taboos, he taught me, are there to be broken.”
Great Art is Great Democracy in Action
One of Rushdie’s essays is called Texts for PEN, a collection of episodes that overlapped with his membership of PEN International. PEN is an organization dedicated to the freedom to write. It assists writers with many independent chapters in over 100 countries.
One section of Texts for PEN covers Rushdie’s concerns leading up to India’s 2014 general election. India is the world’s largest democracy, and Rushdie notes that India has managed to maintain its democracy in an area of the world where few of its neighbors enjoy democratic freedoms.
However, Rushdie offers a stark reminder that a democratic society is about more than the right to vote:
“Democracy is more than mere majoritarianism. Democracy is freedom. In a truly free society, all citizens must feel free, all the time, whether they end up on the winning or losing side in an election: free to express themselves as they choose, free to worship or not worship as they please, free from danger and fear.”
Democratic society was under attack in India leading up to the 2014 election. A group of Hindu extremists succeeded in getting a foundational essay by A. K. Ramanujan removed from Delhi University’s Ramayana studies syllabus. The same extremist group went after a writer published by Penguin Books, and Rushdie’s account of it is frightening:
“…the same fanatical Hindu who attacked Ramanujan’s essay brought an action against Wendy Doniger’s important scholarly work, The Hindus, accusing her, ludicrously and ungrammatically, of being ‘a woman hungry of sex’, and instead of being laughed out of court he succeeded in scaring the mighty Penguin Books into withdrawing the work.”
Narendra Modi’s ascension to power worsened those attacks and made PEN International’s work that much more crucial.
The Power of Stories Endures for Millenia
In his first essay, Wonder Tales, Salman Rushdie explores the enduring appeal of fairy tales across cultures. One of the wonder tales he tackles is The Arabian Nights, whose “sole purpose was enchantment.”
In May 2010, a group of lawyers tried to ban it in Egypt. They argued that it was “a call to vice and sin.” Salman Rushdie’s defense of The Arabian Nights says a great deal about the enduring power of literature:
“There are indeed in that book several references to sex, and the characters seem much more preoccupied with having sex than being devout, which could indeed be, as the lawyers argued, a call to vice, if that’s the deformed puritanical way you see the world. To my mind, this call is an excellent thing and well worth responding to, but you can see how people who dislike music, jokes and pleasure would be upset by it.”
“It is rather wonderful that this ancient text, this wonderful group of wonder tales, retains the power to upset the world’s fanatics more than twelve hundred years after the stories first came into the world.”
Art isn’t only for the elite strata of society - although permutations of it seem tailor-made for them.
At their best, artists of all stripes ask hard questions and offer substantive answers that society must grapple with. Storytellers can approach these questions in concrete ways that intellectuals can over-abstract.
For over 350 pages, Languages of Truth concretizes the ways that artistic expression impacts society for everyone, not just those privileged enough to have home libraries or art galleries.