Fame & Folly

by Cynthia Ozick

  Rushdie’s so-called blasphemy is the fabrication of literalists whose piety can be respected but whose literalism assumes what may not be assumed: that the Creator of the Universe can be diminished by any human agency, that the sacred is susceptible of human soiling. How can a novel blaspheme? How can a work of art (which can also mean a work of dream, play, and irony) blaspheme? Islam, like Judaism, is not an iconic creed (both are famously the opposite), but the philosophers of even iconic religious expressions like medieval Christianity and classical Hinduism do not locate the divine literally in paint or carving, and know that art, while it may, for some, kindle reverence, cannot be a medium for the soiling of the sacred. Art cannot blaspheme because it is not in the power of humankind to demean or besmirch the divine. Can a man’s book tarnish God? “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” the Lord rebukes Job. “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?… Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart?” After which, Job is chastened enough to “lay mine hand upon my mouth.”

  Men who were not there when the foundations of the earth were laid nevertheless lay their hands on a novelist’s mouth. One of Rushdie’s translators, the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, has been murdered; another, the Italian Ettore Capriolo, was seriously wounded. The American publishers of the paperback Satanic Verses hide behind an anonymous “consortium.” And meanwhile Rushdie walks or rides nowhere without his train of guards. After lunching in a dining room of the Pyramid, the other members of the Academy stroll the few yards across the Louvre’s inner court to return to the Richelieu for the afternoon plenary; but Rushdie, emerging alone from the Pyramid like the pharaonic figure he has been made into, is invisibly placed, alone, in a limousine that moves with glacial languor from one part of the courtyard to the other, accompanied by security men slowly pacing beside it and all around it. Rushdie is the prisoner both of his protectors and of his accusers.

  In the eyes of his accusers, his very existence is a blasphemy to be undone and a blemish to be annihilated. Barricaded day and night against fanatic absolutists who look for a chance to kill, who despise reason and discourse, repudiate compromise, and reject amelioration, he has become, in his own person, a little Israel—or, rather, Israel as it felt its circumstances until just recently, before the Rabin-Arafat peace accord (and as it continues to feel them vis-à-vis Hamas and other rejectionists). This is something that, in all logic, has cried out to be said aloud ever since the fatwa was first promulgated; but Rushdie’s defenders, by and large, have not said it—some because they feared to exacerbate his situation (but how could it have been worsened?), some because they have themselves been among Israel’s fiercest ideological opponents. But one fact is incontrovertible: for the mullahs of Iran, who oppose both recognition and peace, Rushdie and the Jews of Israel are to be granted the same doom. What can be deduced from this ugly confluence is, it seems to me, also incontrovertible: morally and practically, there is no way to distinguish between the terrorist whose “cause” is pronounced “just” (and whose assaults on civilians are euphemized as political or religious resistance) and the terrorist who seeks to carry out the mullahs’ fatwa against Rushdie (a call to assassination euphemized as religious duty). One cannot have exculpated Arafat’s Fatah for its long-standing program of bloodshed—not yet wholly suppressed—directed against both Jews and Arabs (the latter for what is termed “collaboration”), while at the same time defending Rushdie and deploring his plight. And in one way, after all, Rushdie is better off than women knifed on street corners or bus passengers blown up: he is at every moment under the surveillance of his security team. On the other hand, individual civilians on their errands, exposed to the brutal lottery of ambush, have their lucky and unlucky days; Rushdie, no longer a civilian, drafted into the unwilling army of victimhood, has drawn the targeted ticket. All his days are unlucky.

  But like James in the Gallery of Apollo, today in the Louvre he means to turn the tables.

  Why link Henry James and Salman Rushdie? They are separated by a century. They were born continents apart. One is a vast and completed library; the other, unfathomable as to his ultimate stature, is in the middle of the way. Moreover (as for the issue of terror), what threatens Rushdie has a name, fatwa, and a habitation—Iran, and all those other places and men and women driven by the mullahs’ imaginings of God’s imperatives. Whereas what threatened James was no more than his own imagination, an extrusion of the psyche’s secrets, nothing enacted in the world of real and ferocious event. What threatened James was a fable of his own making. But a dream, gossamer and ephemeral though it may be, is like a genius loci, the spirit of a site, which can send out exhalations with the force of ciphers or glyphs. Ciphers can be decoded; glyphs can be read across centuries. (Is it the Louvre itself that will speak up for Rushdie? Wait and see.) There is, besides, an arresting nexus of situation and temperament. Like James, Rushdie left the country of his birth for England: each sought, and won, a literary London life. Each kept a backward-glancing eye on his native society. As James never abandoned interest, inquisitiveness, sympathy, and the sometimes adversarial passions of kinship with regard to America, so Rushdie retains a familial, historical and scholarly connection to Islam, warmed by kinship, interest, sympathy. Both men were charged with apostasy—James because near the end of his life, out of gratitude to Britain, he gave up his American citizenship; Rushdie more savagely, on account of having written a fable. Both are in thrall to fable; both have an instinct for the intercultural tale of migration, what James called “the international theme.” Both are beguiled by notions of assimilation and strangeness, of native and newcomer.

  There is more. Rushdie, like James, is secular, history-minded, skeptical, impatient with zealotry. James’s father, though harmless enough, was a man metaphysically besotted, a true believer, dogmatically sunk in Swedenborgian fogs. Having been reared in an atmosphere of private fanaticism, James repudiated its public expression wherever he encountered it. He had nothing but contempt for the accusers of Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer condemned for treason. He followed the case day by day. “I sit … and read L’Affaire Dreyfus. What a bottomless and sinister affaire and in what a strange mill it is grinding.… I eat and drink, I sleep and dream Dreyfus.” He did better than that. He wrote to Zola to congratulate him on the publication of J’Accuse, a defense of Dreyfus—“one of the most courageous things ever done”—for which Zola was brought to trial and convicted. In James’s view, if Zola had not fled from his sentencing, “he would have been torn limb from limb by the howling mob in the street.”

  Bottomless and sinister; apostasy and treason; the howling mob in the street. It is all familiar and instantly contemporary. The determination of the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and their fellow travelers all over Europe, to destroy an innocent and consummately patriotic Frenchman by conspiracy and forgery, and especially by the incitement of mobs, reminds one that the concept of fatwa is not held exclusively by mullahs. And Rushdie too has been conspired against by a kind of forgery: having written a fable, he is represented as having issued a curse; he is charged with betraying Islam. Dreyfus was charged with betraying France. Millions were avid to believe it, until his champion Zola turned the tables on the persecutors.

  It is now clearer than ever that Rushdie is resolved to become, however obliquely, his own champion. Though ringed always by his ferocious security apparatus, he ventures more and more into the hot zone of political suasion. His meeting with President Clinton at the White House in November of 1993 may have constituted, for Rushdie, the hottest—the most influential—zone of all. The mullahs, whose denunciations followed immediately, hardly disagreed, and the White House visit triggered instant State Department warnings to Americans overseas about possible retaliation. No one forgets the murder of that translator; as the anonymity of Rushdie’s paperback publishers shows, it is not easy for others to speak up for him. Even a
mong writers’ organizations, Rushdie’s cause is sometimes reduced to a half-yawning obligatory gesture; after a while even a celebrated crisis grows humdrum and loses the glamor that writers notoriously enjoy. Wole Soyinka (himself in difficulties with an undemocratic regime in Nigeria) points out that standing up for Rushdie is currently out of fashion and looked down on among certain “multicultural” academics: it is considered an intellectual offense to the mores and sensibilities of another culture—very much in the spirit of the Congress on Human Rights in Vienna not long ago, where the idea of the universalism of human rights was initially resisted either as prejudicial to national sovereignty, or else as an objectionable parochial contrivance being foisted on societies that are satisfied with their own standards and values. The danger in defending Rushdie’s right to exist is no longer the simple business of turning oneself into one more lightning rod to attract the assassins. Nowadays, standing up for Rushdie brings another sort of risk: it places one among the stereotypers and the “Orientalists,” as they are often called, who are accused of denigrating whole peoples. To stand up for Rushdie is to display a colonialist mentality. A man’s right to exist is mired in the politics of anti-colonialism—and never mind the irony of this, given Rushdie’s origins as a Muslim born in India.

  Though Iran responded to Rushdie’s White House appearance by labeling the President “the most hated man before all the Muslims of the world,” and though the majority of other Muslim governments have shown official indifference to Rushdie’s situation, not all Muslims have been silent, even in the face of personal endangerment. One hundred Muslim and Arab writers and intellectuals have contributed to For Rushdie, a volume of poems and essays protesting the fatwa—among them the Egyptian Nobel winner Naguib Mahfouz, later attacked and seriously injured by a Muslim extremist in Cairo, and for the same reasons cited by the mullahs of Iran. “Without freedom,” one of the essayists in For Rushdie wrote, “there is no creation, no life, no beauty.”

  In the Academy’s afternoon plenary session, André Miquel, the president of the Collège de France and a distinguished specialist in Arabic literature, proposes a resolution condemning the systematic assassination of Algerian intellectuals by fundamentalist extremists. The language of the resolution is plain: “A terrible thing is happening in Algeria—people are being killed simply because they think.” This action comes under the heading of Intervention, the Academy’s chosen topic for its first year of life—a philosophic theme, but spurred on by the urgencies of Bosnia and Somalia. (Marc Kravetz, editor-in-chief of the French newspaper Libération, a visiting lecturer at this session, counts forty separate conflicts ongoing in the world. How many are cause for intervention, and by whom, and for whom?) Rushdie, who had earlier quietly remarked that he “hoped to speak of something besides myself,” keeps to his word. Without directly offering himself in illustration, he argues against “the specific thrust of the motion,” and suggests that the particular case of Algeria is “typical, part of a larger phenomenon, not just an isolated thing”—that “there is a concentrated program to oppress intellectuals in many countries.” Yashar Kemal, of Turkey (currently in trouble with his own government), mentions the killings in southern Turkey by Hezbollah, the Party of God, and the murder of Turkish intellectuals “fighting for lay principles.” The resolution is altered. “In many countries, and recently in Algeria,” it now begins, “a terrible thing is happening.” Someone raises a question of credibility: is it appropriate for an Academy as newly formed as this one to be sending out resolutions? Don’t we first have to settle down a little, and acquire a recognizable character? To which Rushdie replies: “We should issue motions even if the Academy is newborn. We are not newborn.”

  Luc Ferry, a professor of philosophy at the University of Caen, and another visitor to the plenary, had described Muslim societies, insofar as they fail to separate religion from matters like human rights, as “premodern.” Rushdie, scribbling away as Ferry develops this idea, disputes the term. Moral fundamentalism, Rushdie argues, is not premodern but postmodern—in short, decidedly contemporary. Secular ideals, though they may be taken for granted in Europe, are very seriously under threat elsewhere. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, modernity has been declared to be against religion, and its practitioners denounced as heretical. The concept of human rights is regarded by fundamentalists as an expression of modernity, and is rejected and despised. Moreover, not only are there conflicts between opposing cultures—between, say, fundamentalism and the secularizing West—but the same kind of conflict can occur within a culture, and on its own ground. Finally, if intervention means that you set out from home to supply assistance to another people, then what of terror, which leaves its place of origin to seek you out and destroy you in your own country? “Terror,” Rushdie finishes, “is a reverse form of intervention.”

  He had, as he had promised, not spoken of himself or of his condition. Though composed and eloquent, he had not spoken much at all. When he was neither speaking nor writing, he sat very still, as immobile as a Buddha statue. One got the impression (but impressions can violate) that he had learned to be still; that he had taught himself to be that still. He was, in fact, a magnet of stillness—it was as if that great splendid room were shrinking to a single point of awareness: Rushdie sitting there in his shirtsleeves.

  Come back now to Henry James, and the glyphs he has left behind. In another part of the Louvre on this day, past turnings of corridors, is the darkened Gallery of Apollo, empty but for its portraits and carvings and accretions of gold—as deserted as it was in James’s hot imagining, when the appalling pursuer scrabbled after him over those polished floors. The ghosts of the Louvre are many—kings, cardinals, emperors. Add to these the generations of museum-goers; remember also that Emerson walked here when America itself was almost new—Emerson, whose mind James once described as a “ripe unconsciousness of evil.” In this fanciful place it is today not possible to escape the fullest, ripest consciousness of evil; Rushdie’s hunted presence draws it out. He is poet, fabulist, ironist; he is the one they want to kill because his intelligence is at play. But these ancient galleries, these tremendous, glorious halls, reverberate with a memory of the tables being turned, the pursuer diminished and in flight. Dream? Hallucination? Rushdie in Paris calls up that old nightmare of panic in the Louvre, and how the stalker was driven to retreat. And Paris itself calls up Dreyfus, who was no dream, and the heroic Zola, who routed evil with reason. Still, there is a difference. The terror of our time is stone deaf to reason, and it is not enough for the Dreyfus of our time to suffer being Dreyfus. Against all the odds, he must take on being Zola too.

  OF CHRISTIAN HEROISM

  There is a story about Clare Boothe Luce complaining that she was bored with hearing about the Holocaust. A Jewish friend of hers said he perfectly understood her sensitivity in the matter; in fact, he had the same sense of repetitiousness and fatigue, hearing so often about the Crucifixion.

  —Herbert Gold, “Selfish Like Me”

  I.

  OF THE GREAT European murder of six million Jews, and the murderers themselves, there is little to say. The barbaric years when Jews were hunted down for sport in the middle of the twentieth century have their hellish immortality, their ineradicable infamy, and will inflame the nightmares—and (perhaps) harrow the conscience—of the human race until the sun burns out and takes our poor earth-speck with it. Of the murder and the murderers everything is known that needs to be known: how it was done, who did it, who helped, where it was done, and when, and why. Especially why: the hatred of a civilization that teaches us to say No to hatred.

  Three “participant” categories of the Holocaust are commonly named: murderers, victims, bystanders.* Imagination demands a choosing. Which, of this entangled trio, are we? Which are we most likely to have become? Probably it is hardest of all to imagine ourselves victims. After all, we were here and not there. Or we were Gentiles and not Jews or Gypsies. Or we were not yet born. But if we had already b
een born, if we were there and not here, if we were Jews and not Gentiles …

  “If” is the travail of historians and philosophers, not of the ordinary human article. What we can be sure of without contradiction—we can be sure of it because we are the ordinary human article—is that, difficult as it might be to imagine ourselves among the victims, it is not in us even to begin to think of ourselves as likely murderers. The “banality of evil” is a catchword of our generation; but no, it is an unusual, an exceptional, thing to volunteer for the S.S.; to force aged Jews to their knees to scrub the gutter with their beards; to empty Zyklon B canisters into the hole in the roof of the gas chamber; to enact those thousand atrocities that lead to the obliteration of a people and a culture.