bks wrote:Looks like I may be about to learn something!
Nah. I just read it differently.
Because Le Carre is the clear winner to me. Here's the nub of it, from Rushdie:
I'm grateful to John le Carré for refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be. He claims not to have joined in the attack against me but also states that "there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity."
A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an "insult," and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.
But Rushdie does not understand what Le Carre' says. Le Carre does not hold to (1). He merely claims that,
from the perspective of the offended, The Satanic Verses reads like an insult. The implicit point is clear: though you and I may agree there's no rational basis for their being insulted by it, you can't keep them from being insulted if they feel insulted by it. That is, Rushdie does not get to set the cross-cultural terms for what counts as an insult, and he certainly understood this before he picked up his pen.
Personally, I don't think that's what Le Carre is saying. But if I did, I'd agree with every part of it except the last sentence.
I don't think Rushdie is arguing that he gets to set the cross-cultural terms for insults; he's arguing that in a free society, there should be a universal presumption that no culture gets to issue death threats against novelists whose books it finds offensive. And while I have no idea whether he thought it through at all before he picked up his pen, I doubt that he did. Because it really wasn't a thing before it happened, IIRC. No precedent, to speak of.
Also....I skimmed rather than read the book. But I wouldn't have said it was intentionally blasphemous in a million years if it hadn't already been an issue. I thought it was magical realism that was too gimmicky to be my cup of tea, which struck me as a credible, likely, and sufficient explanation largely because I'd seen it before. It was unfortunately fashionable, for a while.
Anyway. Le Carre. As I read it, the reason he says "no law in life or nature" is that he can't say what he wants to more forthrightly without basically saying, "Oh, fuck the law of the land. Holy authority has a higher prerogative." Because "law" is a very loaded word to use in that context. And he's always been an exceptionally sophisticated writer wrt to that kind of nuance, especially relative to genre. So. If he wasn't trying to suggest that the fatwa represented a higher order of moral imperative than anything a puny, little mortal court of law could come up with, I don't know why he'd use it. That's what it suggests. Same for "impunity." He's going out of his way to ring changes on words that have secular crime-and-punishment connotations in that sentence, basically. And there's also that "great" in "great religions." I mean, it's not that I think Islam's not great or anything. But if it'd had been me, no qualifier being necessary, I just would have said "religions."
Please don't hate me because I'm a close reader. It's the only way I know.
He may think their reading of TSV is philistine, reductionistic, etc. etc., and it may very well be all of that. But Rushdie should know that proving a philistine is a philistine isn't going to change how the philistine feels (and why would Rushdie expect it to? Given that they're philistines, after all. Which they very well may be!).
Rushdie's point (2) has two problems. First, it confuses what is with what ought to be. One shouldn't be threatened for writing a novel, everyone agrees, including Le Carre. But Rushdie was threatened, and it may even have been foreseeable that he would be threatened (though I'd like to know why Le Carre believes this).
Second, Rushdie did not lose his "right" to live in safety. That right, if he has it, is extended to him by his being the member of a liberal polity. He continues to enjoy that right (its just that like all rights, there are limits on what can be done to enforce it). His right to live in safety, such as it is, doesn't extend beyond the confines of the society that issues it, and the neighboring countries who also respect it. Rushdie is wrong if he thinks he (or anyone) has a "right" to live in safety wherever they go, provided they have only written novels. What I believe he means (and should say) is that he ought to be able to live in safety wherever he goes, despite whatever may have been written in a novel bearing his name. And I agree. And so does Le Carre.
Again, different reading on my end, but otherwise, legitimate points all, barring the last one, which is ultimately a judgment call.
Oh, wait. Plus possibly one other. I think you're maybe being a little too dismissive of Rushdie's experience. IIRC, there were real death threats of a kind that would lead a reasonable person to fear real death. I mean, real people associated with the book were stabbed and shot as a part of that fatwa, that much I do remember. Or maybe under color of it, who knows? But at least as I remember it, while it was definitely being politically exploited at the state level on all sides, Rushdie himself wasn't really a major (or starting) player in that arena back then. He wasn't even very visible, was he?
Maybe I don't remember.