the frozen sea

Rushdie on Censorship

Salman Rushdie writes ‘On Censorship’ in The New Yorker:

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes ‘censored art’, and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tropic of Capricorn, every viewer of Last Tango in Paris or A Clockwork Orange, there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who ‘know’ those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.

The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? ‘And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.’

“America bombards you with dreams and deprives you of your own.”

Terry Gilliam, quoted in Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Location of Brazil’ (1985)

An Appreciation of Christopher Hitchens on the Charlie Rose Show

PICTURE: Christopher Hitchens on the Rothschild estate. Taken by Angela Gorgas.

Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and James Fenton came together on the Charlie Rose show last week to celebrate the life and work to celebrate the life of Christopher Hitchens, who would have been 63 on Friday.

The programme was made available on the Charlie Rose website today. Of the many anecdotes told, the following (told by Ian McEwan) has to be the best:

Last time Hitch came to my house, two and half years ago, in central London… . He said ‘Before I come in, before you pour me a drink, there’s a woman on the other side of the square being harassed by some yobs, and we’ve got to go across and sort them out.’ And Martin and I looked at each other [reluctantly]. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s only seven of them. There are three of us!’

James Fenton, challenged to write ‘the first line of the obituary’, sums up:

To me, he was the spirit of ’68. It was the revolutionary spirit that was so engaging and the source, I suppose, of many ridiculous things that were said and felt. But many fine things too.

Günter Grass’s Giant Gaffe

The Economist on Günter Grass’s anti-Israel poem:

Mr Grass’s work is neither good poetry nor effective political pamphleteering. Mr [Marcel] Reich-Ranicki says he is not even sure whether a text without rhyme and rhythm can be considered a poem.

Yet the response from Israeli politicians looks overdone. Salman Rushdie called the travel ban ‘infantile pique’. Avi Primor, a former Israeli ambassador to Germany, called the ban exaggerated and populist, and suggested that Mr Yishai knew nothing about Germany.

Still, the episode will further dent Mr Grass’s once-strong image as Germany’s moral conscience in facing up to the Holocaust. Ever since the 1959 publication of “The Tin Drum”, a novel that covers the rise of Nazism, Mr Grass has prodded Germans to come to terms with their dark past.

But in 2006 he confessed that in 1944, at the age of 17, he had belonged to the Waffen SS. His revelation triggered accusations of hypocrisy from many Germans.

Funny that.

“Especially impressive and courageous was the list of 127 Iranian writers, artists, and intellectuals who, from the prison house that is the Islamic Republic, signed their names to a letter which said: ‘We underline the intolerable character of the decree of death that the Fatwah is, and we insist on the fact that aesthetic criteria are the only proper ones for judging works of art … To the extent that the systematic denial of the rights of man in Iran is tolerated, this can only further encourage the export outside the Islamic Republic of its terroristic methods which destroy freedom’. In other words, the situation is the exact reverse of what the condescending multiculturalists say it is. To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty — and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more ‘offensive’ than that?”

Christopher Hitchens, ‘Assassins of the Mind’ in Vanity Fair (Feb. 2009)

“This word, freedom. It’s a beautiful sounding word, isn’t it? Who would be against freedom? It’s a word everyone would automatically be “for”, one would think. A free society is one in which a thousand flowers bloom, in which a thousand and one voices speak. And what a simple and grand idea that seems. It’s like that copper goddess standing in the harbour, enlightening the world. But in our time, many essential freedoms are in danger of defeat…”

from Salman Rushdie’s address in Delhi (via aninsufferableknowitall)

On video here.

Rushdie, Eco, and Vargas Llosa in conversation.

Salman Rushdie: It’s such a great thing that Mario is not President of Peru. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be writing books . . . I mean, which Mario Vargas Llosa would we like – President Vargas Llosa . . .
Mario Vargas Llosa: You know, Salman, what I say – Peruvians voted against me because they love so much my novels!

Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, and Salman Rushdie in New York City in 2008.

“By the way, ‘The Satanic Verses’ is a book which I would be willing to place a substantial bet that Imran Khan has not read. Back in the day when he was a playboy in London, the most common nickname for him in London circles was ‘Im the dim’. The force of intellect which earned him that nickname is now placed at the service of his people, and its enemy, it seems, is my book. If Imran really wants to argue about the literary merits of ‘The Satanic Verses’, I am happy to meet him in a debate on that subject anywhere and any time. Well, maybe not anywhere.”

Salman Rushdie, in his speech at India Today Conclave 2012, responds to Imran Khan’s accusations against him.

“I once worked in an office building in which some troubled anonymous soul took to destroying the lavatories. It seemed like motiveless, insane destruction, until one day, on a wall next to a wrecked water closet, we read these scribbled words: If the cistern cannot be changed, it must be destroyed. Another radical plumber, Harry Tuttle, would have been proud of him.”

Salman Rushdie, ‘The Location of Brazil’ (1985)

‘Every single women in my family fought against the idea of the veil… They believed, as I believe, that it oppressed women, that it was constructed because of a very bizarre idea of sexuality, which is that for that men to gaze upon the faces and hair of women would inflame them sexually - and that somehow the people you have to punish for that are the women… You can’t live in a world in which half the human race walks around in the bag. It’s not okay.’

Salman Rushdie on Danish television talking about the Burqa and the media’s focus on radical Islam.

apoetreflects:

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

—Salman Rushdie

“My problem with ‘E.T.’ … are those big Walter Keane moonstone eyes, because you immediately love that little creature. There’s a moment in the film when they’re dissecting the frogs and they do a close-up of the frogs with those alien slit eyes. Now if ‘E.T.’ had those eyes, then he’s a really grotesque ugly thing and the kid has to learn to love a grotesque ugly thing. It’s easy to love E.T. It should have been difficult to love E.T.”

Terry Gilliam in conversation with Salman Rushdie