Salman Rushdie

On Tuesday night, the New Hampshire Humanities Council had their 20th annual dinner (photo at left by Deb Cram), and their keynote speaker was Salman Rushdie! Needless to say, it was a very popular event, with over 700 people attending. I haven't been to such a fancy event for awhile: we started out with wine and hors d'oevres with Mr. Rushdie, who walked around the room meeting people, then went into dinner. Gov. John Lynch and the President of the NH Humanities Council spoke, among others, and then we finally got to Rushdie.
His address was on literature in politics in private and public lives, and he was quite the dynamic speaker. You can find a full account on his speech here, at the lovely Concord Monitor. What really struck me was that he spoke a lot about something I've been thinking about lately: how important stories are to man. He said that of all the creatures on the earth, man is the only one who feels the need to tell stories, quoting Heraclitus' famous statment that "a man's character is his fate." He explained that in story-telling, as in real life, who you are determines what will happen to you: Charlie Brown never kicks the football, Captain Ahab has to pursue Moby Dick, and Guinevere and Lancelot have to betray King Arthur: because they wouldn't be who they were if they did otherwise. He closed by urging artists to push out on the boundaries of the universe, against those who keep trying to close it.
This statement left me curious, so while he was signing my copy of The Satanic Verses, I nerved up and asked him if he then thought that those "pushing the universe closed" were as necessary as those opening it.
He gave me a "look" and said he didn't think so, no. He may have also asked me what I thought, but at that point my brain died from the shock of talking to Salman Rushdie (I get acute attacks of OH GOD YOU'RE FAMOUS whenever I attempt to speak to authors at book signings). On further reflection at a safe distance from his intimidating person, I must conclude that I disagree with him. By his own logic, would he be who he was without Ayatollah Khomeini? What work would he have to do without this opposition? What would happen if the universe were totally open and no one was telling people not to do things? I fear we might just all sit back and be complacent. It is the opposition that reminds us what we have to be thankful for, and for what we must still fight. I'm not advocating placing fatwas on people, thereby necessitating their hiding out for nine years, but I think I have something there. Maybe I can say this because I don't have homicidal religious zealots putting a 2.8 million dollar price tag on my head (the whole Satanic Verses controversy is really interesting: check out the wiki page on it).

To conclude, it was an exciting evening. Read at least one thing by Rushdie some time in your life, if only to be exposed to some wonderfully complicated and interesting prose. I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories in senior year of high school for a class, and remember loving it. The latter is designed for young adults, and I'm finding his books aimed at an older audience to be quite challenging, but completely fascinating. He is a writer really worth taking note of, for many reasons. Happy reading!