{"id":6616,"date":"2017-05-15T07:09:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T11:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6616"},"modified":"2017-05-15T07:09:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T11:09:00","slug":"the-role-of-the-novel-in-a-world-of-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6616","title":{"rendered":"The Role of the Novel in a World of Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"reading,

photo: Greg Myers, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

Last week Sir Salman Rushdie gave a humor-laced talk to a packed house at Princeton University, on a topic of profound interest to every writer and reader. In the old days, say two hundred years ago, one purpose of the novel was to \u201cbring people the news,\u201d he said. People who read novels learned about issues they had no direct experience or knowledge of: Charles Dickens and the exploitation of children, the impact of indifferent schooling, and the depredations of the poor-house; Harriet Beecher Stowe and slavery. (Rushdie repeated the apocryphal comment of Abraham Lincoln upon meeting Stowe, \u201cSo you’re the little woman who started this great war!\u201d)<\/p>\n

Today, with so many media outlets providing so many opportunities for people to get news, that purpose for novels has been supplanted. At the same time, \u201cwe,\u201d he said\u2014possibly meaning Princetonians, Americans, or citizens of the world\u2014are more suspicious of the news we get. The attack on truth has gained traction because people are disillusioned with the news media; accusations of \u201cfake news\u201d fall on receptive ears. This, he agrees, is a dangerous development for the republic.<\/p>\n

So what can literature do? \u201cShould we be writing fiction when the world is full of lies?\u201d he asked. While you can anticipate his answer, he gets there in an interesting way. He points to the Pakistani genocide of the educated class in Bangladesh<\/a> shortly before the latter country\u2019s independence, a well documented episode routinely denied by Pakistan. You may be reminded of the Armenian genocide, and the persistent Holocaust deniers. In writing about events such as that which occurred in Bangladesh, which is in Rushdie\u2019s living memory, even \u201cthe act of remembering is politicized.\u201d The difference between this world of lies and the novel, is that \u201cfiction tells you it\u2019s a lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m watching the superb televersion of Margaret Atwood\u2019s classic novel The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, and I find it so disturbing, so seemingly possible. Even though its underlying truth resonates, I know it flows from a work of fiction\u2014something made up\u2014and that it is not a reflection of objective reality as the purveyors of alt.right dogma contend with their false fictions.<\/p>\n

Over many generations, artists (and scientists) find themselves in frequent conflict with politicians because \u201cpoliticians want to control the narrative.\u201d The more authoritarian they are, the more control they want.<\/p>\n

Here he did not explicitly describe Ayatollah Khomeini\u2019s fatwa calling for his death, issued after publication of his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses<\/em>, but that dramatic episode was clearly on the minds of his audience. (In case you\u2019ve forgotten, Rushdie went into hiding for a few years, and a further fatwa against anyone involved in the novel\u2019s publication apparently resulted in the murder of his translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, and assassination attempts against the book\u2019s Italian translator and its Norwegian publisher, while its Turkish translator was a likely target in an arson attack that resulted in 37 deaths.)<\/p>\n

The current crisis in America, he said, arises out of the desire not just to control the narrative, but to totally rewrite it. The recent threats to defund the arts and public broadcasting were transparently not based on the politicians\u2019 stated aim\u2014cost-cutting, which was dubious on its face, since in the federal budget context, these programs are miniscule\u2014but on a much more fundamental hostility to the arts and artistic expression.<\/p>\n

In the end, Rushdie said, it is the arts that help us understand the culture of the past: how do we know what went on generations and millennia ago absent the writing, paintings, sculpture, architecture, and other artistic expressions of those former times? While the authorities may control the present, artists\u2019 legacy controls what future generations will think of us.<\/p>\n

WEDNESDAY: Rushdie and the Role of the Novelist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week Sir Salman Rushdie gave a humor-laced talk to a packed house at Princeton University, on a topic of profound interest to every writer and reader. In the old days, say two hundred years ago, one purpose of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Role of the Novel in a World of Lies -- Salman Rushdie on fiction's place today","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,174,266,268],"tags":[416,1011,414],"class_list":["post-6616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-history","category-politics","tag-real-life","tag-salman-rushdie","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1II","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6619,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6616\/revisions\/6619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}