An account of Rushdie's 4 p.m.
discussion of his fiction with Albion College faculty and students (24 May 2003)
Salman Rushdie arrived at Albion College at 2:30 p.m. on May 24, and
attended his first Q&A session at 4 p.m.: a gathering of faculty and
students who had spent the past several months reading and discussing three of
Rushdie's works: East, West, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and
Midnight's Children.
Professors Andrew Bethune
of the English Department and Bindu Madhok of the Philosophy Department
moderated the discussion; both provided brief introductions.
Professor Bethune remembered attending previous Rushdie
readings; Professor Madhok spoke of the cultural
background she shares with Rushdie.
Below are some of the highlights of the question and
answer period (except when quoted
directly, questions and answers are paraphrased):
|
 | Haroun and the Sea of Stories:
 | QUESTION: You have said you wrote this novel for your
son. Do you think of it as a children's story? |
| ANSWER: "I thought my son [Zafar] would read it at 11
and at 24--he did, and he loved it both times." Rushdie calls Haroun
a fable, "a simple way of saying complicated things." Noting that he wrote
it in the wake of the fatwa, when his son made him promise he would
write a book for children, Rushdie said he took this promise seriously. He
said he felt like Paul Simon, who in his lullaby "St. Judy's Comet" says "If
I can't sing my child to sleep/Well it makes your famous daddy look so
dumb." Haroun took six months to write; after composing the first
three chapters, Rushdie showed it to his son, who said "I like it; of
course, some people might be bored." When asked why, Zafar said "it doesn't
have enough jump in it." Rushdie said this was an extremely helpful
response, and led to substantial revisions that significantly altered the
tone and pace of the story. Rushdie also noted that Italo Calvino's story
collection
Our Ancestors was one of the models for Haroun.
|
|
| Midnight's Children:
| QUESTION: Can you describe the the process of writing
this novel? |
| ANSWER: "It took over five years to write." Rushdie
noted that after spending two years on the novel, he decided to scrap the
third-person perspective, which he said "was not properly alive," and that
"once I found the first-person voice it became the engine that drove the
book." He added that the search for the appropriate form for a given
subject is the essential quest for any serious novelist; "each book requires
you to come up with a completely new approach." |
|
| "The Free Radio" (in East, West):
| QUESTION: In our discussions we disagreed about the
narrator of this story. Some of us see him as the moral center of the story,
even after acknowledging his flaws. Others view him as so thoroughly
unreliable that they were ready to believe Ramani the rickshaw-wallah when
he writes from Bombay of his success in Bollywood. How do you see your
narrator? |
| ANSWER: "The narrator is annoying." Rushdie noted that he "won't shut up," and described him as
"nasty, rude, judgmental, politically quietist, sexist." He explained that he set out to
create a narrator who was "a pain in the neck," but who also clearly cares
deeply about the rickshaw-driver. Annoying septuagenarian as moral center,
perhaps? Rushdie also noted that when he submitted this story to the
Atlantic Monthly, where it originally appeared, the editors
re-punctuated the story without seeking his approval, breaking many of the
long sentences into shorter ones. Since Rushdie's original punctuation was
intended to limn the logorrheic
nature of the narrator, these changes obscured
this strategy. He said he was shocked that a major magazine would make such
changes without consultation, and since then has taken steps to prevent a
repeat.
|
|
| "The Prophet's Hair" (in East, West):
| QUESTION: When my students read this story, they felt
almost guilty for laughing at the carnage at the end. Could you comment on
the shifting tone of "The Prophet's Hair"? |
| ANSWER: "Henrich von Kleist's "The
Earthquake in Chile" stands behind this story. . . . When catastrophes
occur at incredibly high speed they become comic as well as dreadful. . .
.I've always been interested in the technical question of a story's tempo. .
. . If you tell tragedy too quickly it becomes funny." Rushdie added that
"The Prophet's Hair" is his "Sam Peckinpah story."
|
|
| "The Courter" (in East, West):
| QUESTION: This story seems intensely
autobiographical. The 16-year-old narrator seems an authorial alter-ego, and
when he beats the "Field Marshal Sir Charles Lutwidge-Dogson" at chess,
I sense Salman Rushdie slyly announcing both an affinity for Lewis Carroll
(who also loved palindromes, puns, and other word games) and a desire to
undermine the cultural imperialism he symbolizes in the story (it's probably
worth noting that chess originated in India). Is this story as
autobiographical and self-referential as it seems? |
| ANSWER: "It was deliberately writtten to seem
like autobiography, but it's not." Rushdie said the story "Harmony of the
Spheres" is closest to his own personal experience, since he had a close
friend, a Welsh writer, who developed schizophrenia. He did say that the
Eastern European cab driver in "The Courter" is an homage to someone he met
when he worked in London for Ogilvy and Mather. Rushdie and a group of
co-workers regularly played chess during lunch, and the Polish janitor who
worked for the company "beat us all." Rushdie said he and his co-workers
discovered that he had been a championship player in Poland, but was now
reduced to near-poverty in England. "The only language he had left was
chess." |
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