A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
OF HISSY
FITS AND HUMAN FREEDOMS
Well, it's not
Hulk Hogan versus Randy "Macho Man"
Savage, but it's a good brawl nonetheless.
Two of the world's
most well-known writers, John Le Carre and Salman
Rushdie, are currently having a
scratch-your-eyes-out in the letters page of
London's respected daily the Guardian.
And while a fusillade of angry gibes in a
newspaper by a couple of authors may not be the
stuff of bare knuckles and bloody noses, at least
Le Carre and Rushdie are arguing issues of great
moment to civilization. And fight fans may want
to note that the tone has at least a moderate
level of Melrose Place venom.
Rushdie is best
known not as an author but as a protected ward of
the police. He has lived under the constant
watchful eye of Scotland Yard somewhere in the
United Kingdom ever since his irreverent novel The
Satanic Verses led Iran's Muslim clerics to
pronounce a fatwa (a sort of religious
"wanted: dead or alive") upon him. Le
Carre is one of the world's best-known writers of
espionage potboilers like The Little Drummer
Girl.
Our story so far:
Rushdie wrote a condescending review of Le
Carre's The Russia House in 1989. This
may or may not have prompted Le Carre to write a
letter to the Guardian soon after. In it
he alluded to some of the same sentiments about
Rushdie's literary judgment that have recently
surfaced in greater detail.
The next salvo
begins with a speech Le Carre made to the
Anglo-Israel Association last month. The speech
was something of an apologia for Le Carre, who
has been plagued by accusations in the American
literary community that his spy novels are
anti-Semitic. An excerpt from the speech was
printed in the Guardian on November 15,
and on the eighteenth a letter from Rushdie
appeared in the paper which commented that he
would be more sympathetic to Le Carre's plight
"had he not been so ready to join in an
earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow
writer."
Le Carre retorted
in print that he had never been one of Rushdie's
assailants, nor had he followed "the easy
path of proclaiming Rushdie to be a shining
innocent." His purpose in the 1989 letter
had been to remind people that there was no
absolute standard of free speech in any society,
and that some cultures and religions are further
down the road of tolerance than others. It was
not all that long ago that Christianity, he
reminded Rushdie, also took a punitive stance
towards its detractors.
"My purpose
was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie,
which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to
sound a less arrogant, less colonialist, and less
self-righteous note than we were hearing from the
safety of his admirers' camp."
Rushdie
immediately responded, "I'm grateful to John
Le Carre for refreshing all our memories about
exactly how pompous an ass he can be." In
the effete world of writers, that meant that the
gloves were off. Rushdie insisted that Le Carre's
letter "suggests that anyone who displeases
philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk
loses his right to live in safety." He
agreed with Le Carre that free speech was not an
absolute--"we have the freedoms we fight
for, and we lose those we don't defend."
Rushdie's parting shot was that Le Carre's most
famous creation, George Smiley, knew that, but
"his creator seems to have forgotten."
Britcrit
Christopher Hitchens weighed into the slugfest
next, on Rushdie's side. Hitchens said that Le
Carre had been "evasive and
euphemistic" about Iran's murder contract on
Rushdie "on the grounds that ayatollahs had
feelings too."
In the November 21
Guardian (don't these guys ever write
for pay anymore?) Le Carre threw a roundhouse
right, saying that "two rabid
ayatollahs" could not have done a better job
of smearing him than Rushdie and Hitchens. Using
the time-honored principle of divide and conquer,
Le Carre mused, "But will the friendship
last? I am amazed that Hitchens has put up with
Rushdie's self-canonization for so long."
Le Carre said that
"there is no law in life or nature that says
that great religions may be insulted with
impugnity." Rushdie knew full well the
consequences of insulting Muslims in the realm of
the sacred and then had screamed "foul"
when the rattlesnake he had provoked bit him.
"The pain he has had to endure is appalling,
but it doesn't make a martyr of him, nor... does
it sweep away all argument about the ambiguities
of his participation in his own downfall."
He concluded by stating his hope that Rushdie's
and Hitchens' letters would become required
reading for all students "of cultural
intolerance masquerading as free speech," a
nice self-serving bid to back-door his way into
textbooks as a cause celebre if not a writer.
As the plebeians
began to declare their allegiances to Rushdie or
Le Carre on the Guardian's letters page,
Le Carre announced through his spokesman that he
had signed off on the argument. Rushdie had one
more broadside, a November 22 bit of invective
which said of Le Carre, "Every time he opens
his mouth, he digs himself into a deeper hole.
Keep digging, John, keep digging. Me, I'm going
back to work."
As literary fights
go, the subject is a meaty one--but let's not
draw any hasty conclusions about its importance.
Among writers, good brawls should produce good
literature. It did for Alexander Pope with regard
to Thomas Shadwell, and likewise for John Henry
Newman concerning his bete noire Charles
Kingsley. I'm not sure that either Rushdie or Le
Carre deserves to be mentioned in the same
sentence as Pope or Newman, but I will suspend
judgment until this contest appears within the
covers of a book.
So . . . who won?
If the votes of
the literary community determine the winner, then
Hitchens' presence in the Rushdie camp makes the
Satanic versifier triumphant.
However, I'm not
sure that it's a good idea to let anyone who has
an interest in the works of either men decide the
issue. They are two very different authors.
Rushdie is an acclaimed prose stylist whose
modernist retooling of form and voice makes him
just the sort of author whose writing gave you a
headache in sophomore lit class. Those with a
natural bias towards his point of view will
include avid devourers of The New York Times
Review of Books, people with Ph.D.s in the
humanities, and other such people with pointy
heads. Le Carre is not Nobel fodder; he spins
rattling good yarns in a serviceable but hardly
distinguished style. His defenders would probably
include the paperback-at-the-beach crowd (i.e.,
the great unwashed).
If the matter is
settled by the traditional weapons of
writers--words--we again have to give Rushdie the
nod. He gets in most of the good jabs at his
opponent . . . although we may have to dock him a
few points for his petulant "nyah,
nyah" attempt to get in the last word. But
if this is a battleground of ideas, then Le Carre
is the clear winner, Hitchens or no Hitchens.
First, Rushdie misrepresents Le Carre. No matter
how derisive Rushdie has been towards Muhammed
and his followers, only a xenophobic nutjob
mullah (or his seriously deluded followers) would
call for someone's execution because of a novel.
Le Carre is certainly no sympathizer with the
imams, and for Rushdie and Hitchens to represent
him as one does their argument a serious
disservice.
More importantly,
freedom of speech does not mean that you can cry
"Fire!" in a crowded mosque and expect
to get away with it. As a lapsed Moslem, Rushdie
is all-too-aware that many of his former
coreligionists (in stark contrast to their
medieval reputation) are among the most
dangerously intolerant people on Earth. His
former hometown of Bombay is frequently a war
zone over slights, imagined or real, between the
Moslem and Hindu communities. Neighboring
Pakistan openly persecutes Christians; to
proselytize a Moslem, or for a Moslem to convert
to another faith, is punishable by death. Members
of the Bahai faith are the favored targets in
Iran. Saudi Arabia is so closed off to other
religions that American GIs weren't even allowed
to carry Bibles during Desert Storm. And the
Islamic government of Sudan is currently busy
promulgating genocide and chattel slavery among
its Christian and animist citizens.
This is not to say
that all, or even most, Moslems condone the fatwa
or other manifestations of Muslim bigotry. But
the only thing that can rouse the ire of Middle
Eastern and South Asian Moslems more than infidel
Western intellectuals is a turncoat local who becomes
an infidel Western intellectual. And the only
thing worse than journalistic attempts to cast
aspersions on Islamic social practices is
anti-Islamic fiction. At least journalists serve
the political machinery of the Great Satan. A
fiction writer is deliberately making things up
to hurt the One True Faith, or so goes the
thinking of these very scary people.
As repugnant as
the thinking is behind the $fatwa$, Rushdie's
keen awareness of what he was getting himself
into does, as Le Carre insists, take the
burnished edge off of his self-proclaimed
martyrdom in the name of art. Play around with
the faith of eight hundred million people, and
you're playing with fire. The fact that they are
wrong to hound you into hiding does not take away
your responsibility for provoking them in the
first place.
Rushdie's
supporters may claim that he is merely speaking
up for truth and justice. Baloney. What novelists
there are who still believe in such things are
sensitive enough to the core beliefs of millions
to make their points in a way that does not
deliberately poke fun at the beloved prophet of
those core beliefs. Whether $The Satanic Verses$
is great literature is best left in the hands of
the critics. What it isn't is constructive
engagement with the truth. Either Rushdie was a
fool or he was callously yanking the chains of
millions.
This debate
illustrates a satisfying fact for writers: Words
have weight. That weight carries consequences.
Whether his writing is remembered or forgotten in
a generation, Rushdie's printed words have
realized his dream for him in that people care
about his books. The problem is that too many of
the wrong people--people who are not afraid to
kill over words--care.
E-Mail CaptainSpaulding
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?
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For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations
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For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel
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For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic
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For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee
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For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
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For Me #7-- Princess Diana
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For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
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For Me #9-- Mother Teresa
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For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash
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For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?
Hooray
For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks from
Soccer
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For Me #13-- O Canada! Who Stands on Guard For
Thee?
Hooray
For Me #14-- Suicide is Painless, but Loss of
Creative...
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For Me #15-- Synergy for the Devil
