Rushdie Shares Views

"The Satanic Verses" Author Lectures At University

Last updated Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:05 PM CDT in News

By Dan Craft
The Morning News

He recounted the phone call from a British Broadcasting Corp. journalist.

"He said something to the effect of, 'The ayatollah has ordered a death sentence for you. Do you care to comment,'" Salman Rushdie said.

Rushdie remembers his first words, but they can't be printed in a newspaper. They got a chuckle out of about 150 University of Arkansas students, though.

ROLE OF WRITERS

There is no such thing, according to Rushdie.

"The great thing about literature is that nobody owns it. The only role of a writer is to be the writer he wishes to be," Rushdie said. "Books don't change the world by making you want to jump up and shout slogans. They change the world one reader at a time."

Literature succeeds when it brings out the unexpected, or when it applies seriousness to frivolous situations or banter to serious ones, he said.

"Literature can humanize. It's love in a combat zone. Or, it's like talking seriously about literature by saying nobody reads books anyway, so let's all go to MySpace," he said.

There will always be a place in the world for literature and art, Rushdie said.

"The project of art is to open the universe a little more. You go to the edge and push out," he said.

LIFE CHOICES

Born in India and schooled in England, he thought he would return to India to live after college.

"I never expected my life to be lived mostly in the West," he said. "Sometimes, you look back at what seemed like a small choice and realize what large consequences it had."

Life is a constant series of choices, each of which has the potential for long-term implications, he said. He talks of a "shadow self," the life a person would have led if different choices had been made.

"It's not about the fork in the road. It's about all the forks, big and small," he said.

FREE SPEECH

"The principle of free speech is that it's OK to piss someone off," Rushdie said.

Each expression is weighed by its creator, judged on relevance and offensiveness, and each person makes different judgments, Rushdie said.

"I've seen the prophet cartoons, and I would have run them. Some of them weren't funny, some were. The ones that offended people were the funnier ones, I think," Rushdie said. "The apology was wrong, I think, because it wasn't about respect, it was about intimidation. In the grown-up world, sometimes you have to deal with things you don't like. That's just the way it is."

THE INTERNET

Books remain a relevant form of speech in the Internet age, especially in non-Western societies where novels have only been a mainstream part of literature for the last century, he said.

"The Internet is a fantastic creative tool that we don't yet fully understand." he said. "Most of the creative content of the Internet is rubbish, but you can say the same for much of the content in any bookstore."

GUN LAWS

Rushdie recalls arguing about access to firearms on a political roundtable television show. Guns are less common in Europe, and the Second Amendment does not specifically allow firearms for citizens, only militias, he said.

"Jerry Springer and I deeply bonded" in arguing with singer Ted Nugent, a National Rifle Association member, over access to handguns, Rushdie said.

In response to the recent shooting at Virginia Tech, Rushdie feels people are asking the wrong questions.

"I take the totally un-American view of asking why this isn't about gun laws," Rushdie said. "We're having the wrong conversation about this event."

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