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):
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories:
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QUESTION: You have said you wrote this novel for your son. Do you think of it as a children's story? |
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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.
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Midnight's Children:
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QUESTION: Can you describe the the process of writing this novel? |
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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." |
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"The Free Radio" (in East, West):
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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? |
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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.
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"The Prophet's Hair" (in East, West):
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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"? |
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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." |
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"The Courter" (in East, West):
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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? |
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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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