{"id":6625,"date":"2017-05-17T07:14:20","date_gmt":"2017-05-17T11:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6625"},"modified":"2017-05-17T07:14:20","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T11:14:20","slug":"salman-rushdie-on-the-role-of-the-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6625","title":{"rendered":"Salman Rushdie on The Role of the Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"pregnant

photo: Ed Yourdan, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

In a Princeton talk last week, Sir Salman not only discussed the role of the novel<\/a> in, as he said, \u201ca world of lies,\u201d but also how writers must work in the modern world.<\/p>\n

The fast pace of today\u2019s world suggests that literary writers cannot be too topical without risking irrelevance in the near future. Shakespeare\u2019s plays have survived four hundred years because they were about universal human truths, even if his characters bore the names of actual historical figures.<\/p>\n

Nor can writers choose too large a theme (\u201ceverything\u201d) without risking violation of the human scale at which the novel form excels. Thus it may be difficult to take on large-scale issues, as noted author \u00a0Amitav Ghosh<\/a> encourages literary authors to do, especially around the central challenge facing humanity today, climate change. Another way of saying this emerged in a recent Rebecca Mead<\/a> profile of Margaret Atwood.<\/em> \u201cA novelist necessarily imagines the fate of individuals,\u201d Mead says, in harmony with Rushdie. \u201cThe human condition is what the novel was made for exploring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Atwood put her characters in a story with a huge theme: radically changed power dynamics in an American society that has become a fundamentalist theocracy. Imagining such alternative realities should be the literary fiction-writer\u2019s strength, Gawande believes. I\u2019d love to hear the three of them discuss this issue together. I think they\u2019d agree that, regardless of the novel\u2019s scope, it\u2019s the characters that make it resonate with readers.<\/p>\n

Another feature of modern life affecting authors is the loss of space between public and private action. He said that Jane Austen\u2019s books, though replete with soldiers, never referred to the Napoleonic wars. Nor did Dickens ever mention the British Empire. The characters in these books lived unimpeded and unaffected by world events. Such is no longer true. \u201cThe history of the United States is now the history of everywhere else,\u201d he said. We live in a world where we are barraged by outside forces, many of which can change our lives. It is not only our character that shapes our destinies, or those elements of chance and randomness that have always entered in, but the world around us (another point of agreement with Ghosh).<\/p>\n

Today, it seems people try to narrow their identities to one feature of themselves\u2014Republican, feminist, Asian-American, computer nerd\u2014which makes it harder to find common ground with others. The novel has always understood that we\u2019re all a collection of selves, he said, and which comes to the fore depends on circumstances. I\u2019m reminded of a conversation between Winston Churchill and portraitist Graham Sutherland in the TV series The Crown<\/em>, when Churchill asks (paraphrasing here) \u201cAre you going to paint me as a venerated statesman or as a sturdy English bulldog?\u201d and the painter responds, \u201cI imagine there are quite a few Churchills in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Art tries to increase our awareness of what is possible for us to see and know. For that reason, artists must push the boundaries, despite inevitable opposition. Meanwhile, it\u2019s the duty of everyone to work to protect our culture, the products of art. The power of art to outlast tyranny is great, but the power of artists, not so much, he said. They need to be defended too.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a Princeton talk last week, Sir Salman not only discussed the role of the novel in, as he said, \u201ca world of lies,\u201d but also how writers must work in the modern world. The fast pace of today\u2019s world … 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":"Salman Rushdie on The Role of the Writer - push those boundaries!","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":[62,40,174],"tags":[13,361,416,1011,979,414],"class_list":["post-6625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","tag-charles-dickens","tag-jane-austen","tag-real-life","tag-salman-rushdie","tag-the-handmaids-tale","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1IR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625","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=6625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6626,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625\/revisions\/6626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}