Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

by Salman Rushdie

  The sensitive novelist’s reasons are to be found in the essay’s last sentence, in which Orwell speaks of ‘the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.’

  And we are told that fatalism is a quality of Indian thought.

  It is impossible not to include in any response to ‘Inside the Whale’ the suggestion that Orwell’s argument is much impaired by his choice, for a quietist model, of Henry Miller. In the forty-four years since the essay was first published, Miller’s reputation has more or less completely evaporated, and he now looks to be very little more than the happy pornographer beneath whose scatological surface Orwell saw such improbable depths. If we, in 1984, are asked to choose between, on the one hand, the Miller of Tropic of Cancer and ‘the first hundred pages of Black Spring’ and, on the other hand, the collected works of Auden, MacNeice and Spender, I doubt that many of us would go for old Henry. So it would appear that politically committed art can actually prove more durable than messages from the stomach of the fish.

  It would also be wrong to go any further without discussing the senses in which Orwell uses the term ‘politics’. Six years after ‘Inside the Whale’, in the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), he wrote: ‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.’

  For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell, ‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own world-view. It was an underworld-become-overworld, Hell on earth. ‘Politics’ was a portmanteau term which included everything he hated; no wonder he wanted to keep it out of literature.

  I cannot resist the idea that Orwell’s intellect, and finally his spirit, too, were broken by the horrors of the age in which he lived, the age of Hitler and Stalin (and, to be fair, by the ill health of his later years). Faced with the overwhelming evils of exterminations and purges and fire-bombings, and all the appalling manifestations of politics-gone-wild, he turned his talents to the business of constructing and also of justifying an escape-route. Hence his notion of the ordinary man as victim, and therefore of passivity as the literary stance closest to that of the ordinary man. He is using this type of logic as a means of building a path back to the womb, into the whale and away from the thunder of war. This looks very like the plan of a man who has given up the struggle. Even though he knows that ‘there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”’, he attempts the construction of a mechanism with just that purpose. Sit it out, he recommends; we writers will be safe inside the whale, until the storm dies down. I do not presume to blame him for adopting this position. He lived in the worst of times. But it is important to dispute his conclusions, because a philosophy built on an intellectual defeat must always be rebuilt at a later point. And undoubtedly Orwell did give way to a kind of defeatism and despair. By the time he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, sick and cloistered on Jura, he had plainly come to think that resistance was useless. Winston Smith considers himself a dead man from the moment he rebels. The secret book of the dissidents turns out to have been written by the Thought Police. All protest must end in Room 101. In an age when it often appears that we have all agreed to believe in entropy, in the proposition that things fall apart, that history is the irreversible process by which everything gradually gets worse, the unrelieved pessimism of Nineteen Eighty-Four goes some way towards explaining its status as a true myth of our times.

  What is more (and this connects the year’s parallel phenomena of Empire-revivalism and Orwellmania), the quietist option, the exhortation to submit to events, is an intrinsically conservative one. When intellectuals and artists withdraw from the fray, politicians feel safer. Once, the right and left in Britain used to argue about which of them ‘owned’ Orwell. In those days both sides wanted him; and, as Raymond Williams has said, the tug-of-war did his memory little honour. I have no wish to reopen these old hostilities; but the truth cannot be avoided, and the truth is that passivity always serves the interests of the status quo, of the people already at the top of the heap, and the Orwell of ‘Inside the Whale’ and Nineteen Eighty-Four is advocating ideas that can only be of service to our masters. If resistance is useless, those whom one might otherwise resist become omnipotent.

  It is much easier to find common ground with Orwell when he comes to discuss the relationship between politics and language. The discoverer of Newspeak was aware that ‘when the general [political] atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.’ In ‘Politics and the English Language’ he gives us a series of telling examples of the perversion of meaning for political purposes. ‘Statements like “Marshal Pétain was a true patriot”, “The Soviet Press is the freest in the world”, “The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution” are almost always made with intent to deceive,’ he writes. He also provides beautiful parodies of politicians’ metaphor-mixing: ‘The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.’ Recently, I came across a worthy descendant of these grand old howlers: The Times, reporting the smuggling of classified documents out of Civil Service departments, referred to the increased frequency of ‘leaks’ from ‘a high-level mole’.

  It’s odd, though, that the author of Animal Farm, the creator of so much of the vocabulary through which we now comprehend these distortions—doublethink, thoughtcrime, and the rest—should have been unwilling to concede that literature was best able to defend language, to do battle with the twisters, precisely by entering the political arena. The writers of the Group 47 in post-war Germany, Grass, Böll and the rest, with their ‘rubble literature’ whose purpose and great achievement it was to rebuild the German language from the rubble of Nazism, are prime instances of this power. So, in quite another way, is a writer like Joseph Heller. In Good as Gold the character of the presidential aide Ralph provides Heller with some superb satire at the expense of Washingtonspeak. Ralph speaks in sentences that usually conclude by contradicting their beginnings: ‘This administration will back you all the way until it has to’; ‘This President doesn’t want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them.’ Every time Ralph opens his oxymoronic mouth he reveals the limitations of Orwell’s view of the interaction between literature and politics. It is a view which excludes comedy, satire, deflation; because of course the writer need not always be the servant of some beetle-browed ideology. He can also be its critic, its antagonist, its scourge. From Swift to Solzhenitsyn, writers have discharged this role with honour. And remember Napoleon the Pig.

  Just as it is untrue that politics ruins literature (even among ‘ideological’ political writers, Orwell’s case would founder on the great rock of Pablo Neruda), so it is by no means axiomatic that the ‘ordinary man’, l’homme moyen sensuel, is politically passive. We have seen that the myth of this inert commoner was a part of Orwell’s logic of retreat; but it is nevertheless worth reminding ourselves of just a few instances in which the ‘ordinary man’—not to mention the ‘ordinary woman’—has been anything but inactive. We may not approve of Khomeini’s Iran, but the revolution there was a genuine mass movement. So is the revolution in Nicaragua. And so, let us not forget, was the Indian revolution. I wonder if independence would have arrived in 1947 if the masses, ignoring Congress and the Muslim League, had remained seated inside what would have had to be a very large whale indeed.

  The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places; the missiles have made sure of that. However much we may wish to return to the womb, we cannot be unborn. So we are left with a fairly straightforward choice. Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish, for which a second metaphor is that of Pangloss’s garden; or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever—that is, we can make the very devil of a racket. Cer
tainly, when we cry, we cry partly for the safety we have lost; but we also cry to affirm ourselves, to say, here I am, I matter, too, you’re going to have to reckon with me. So, in place of Jonah’s womb, I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; in place of the whale, the protesting wail. If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a new-born child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

  I must make one thing plain: I am not saying that all literature must now be of this protesting, noisy type. Perish the thought; now that we are babies fresh from the womb, we must find it possible to laugh and wonder as well as rage and weep. I have no wish to nail myself, let alone anyone else, to the tree of political literature for the rest of my writing life. Lewis Carroll and Laurence Sterne are as important to literature as Swift or Brecht. What I am saying is that politics and literature, like sport and politics, do mix, are inextricably mixed, and that that mixture has consequences.

  The modern world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say, the Sandinista version, that there is almost no common ground. It becomes necessary to take sides, to say whether or not one thinks of Nicaragua as the United States’s ‘front yard’. (Vietnam, you will recall, was the ‘back yard’.) It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.

  Outside the whale is the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history. Outside the whale there is a genuine need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world. Outside the whale we see that we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics; we see that it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep. Outside the whale it becomes necessary, and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes (e.g., Zia’s Pakistan) both at once. Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success. Outside the whale is the world of Samuel Beckett’s famous formula: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

  This is why (to end where I began) it really is necessary to make a fuss about Raj fiction and the zombie-like revival of the defunct Empire. The various films and TV shows and books I discussed earlier propagate a number of notions about history which must be quarrelled with, as loudly and as embarrassingly as possible.

  These include: The idea that non-violence makes successful revolutions; the peculiar notion that Kasturba Gandhi could have confided the secrets of her sex-life to Margaret Bourke-White; the bizarre implication that any Indians could look like or speak like Amy Irving or Christopher Lee; the view (which underlies many of these works) that the British and Indians actually understood each other jolly well, and that the end of the Empire was a sort of gentleman’s agreement between old pals at the club; the revisionist theory—see David Lean’s interviews—that we, the British, weren’t as bad as people make out; the calumny, to which the use of rape-plots lends credence, that frail English roses were in constant sexual danger from lust-crazed wogs (just such a fear lay behind General Dyer’s Amritsar massacre); and, above all, the fantasy that the British Empire represented something ‘noble’ or ‘great’ about Britain; that it was, in spite of all its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous.

  If books and films could be made and consumed in the belly of the whale, it might be possible to consider them merely as entertainment, or even, on occasion, as art. But in our whaleless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

  1984

  ATTENBOROUGH’S GANDHI

  Deification is an Indian disease, and in India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, great soul, little father, has been raised higher than anyone in the pantheon of latter-day gods. ‘But,’ I was asked more than once in India recently, ‘why should an Englishman want to deify Gandhi?’ And why, one might add, should the American Academy wish to help him, by presenting, like votive offerings in a temple, eight glittering statuettes to a film that is inadequate as biography, appalling as history, and often laughably crude as a film?

  The answer may be that Gandhi (the film, not the man, who irritated the British immensely, but who is now safely dead) satisfies certain longings in the Western psyche, which can be categorized under three broad headings. First, the exotic impulse, the wish to see India as the fountainhead of spiritual-mystical wisdom. Gandhi, the celluloid guru, follows in the footsteps of other pop holy men. The Maharishi blazed this trail. Second, there is what might be termed the Christian longing, for a ‘leader’ dedicated to ideals of poverty and simplicity, a man who is too good for this world and is therefore sacrificed on the altars of history. And third, there is the liberal-conservative political desire to hear it said that revolutions can, and should, be made purely by submission, and self-sacrifice, and non-violence alone. To make Gandhi appeal to the Western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ—an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer—and the history of one of the century’s greatest revolutions had to be mangled. This is nothing new. The British have been mangling Indian history for centuries.

  Much of the debate about the film has concerned omissions: why no Subhas Bose? Why no Tagore? The film’s makers answer that it would have been impossible to include everything and everyone, and of course selection is central to any work of art. But artistic selection creates meanings, and in Gandhi these are frequently dubious and in some cases frighteningly naïve.

  Take the Amritsar massacre. This is perhaps the most powerful sequence in the film. Both the massacre and the subsequent court-martial, at which outraged Englishmen question the unrepentant Dyer with barely suppressed horror, are staged accurately and with passion. But what these two scenes mean is that Dyer’s actions at Jallianwala Bagh were those of a cruel, over-zealous individual, and that they were immediately condemned by Anglo-India. And that is a complete falsehood.

  The British in Punjab in 1919 were panicky. They feared a second Indian Mutiny. They had nightmares about rape. The court-martial may have condemned Dyer, but the colonists did not. He had taught the wogs a lesson; he was a hero. And when he returned to England, he was given a hero’s welcome. An appeal fund launched on his behalf made him a rich man. Tagore, disgusted by the British reaction to the massacre, returned his knighthood.

  In the case of Amritsar, artistic selection has altered the meaning of the event. It is an unforgivable distortion.

  Another example: the assassination of Gandhi. Attenborough considers it important enough to place it at the beginning as well as the end of his film; but during the intervening three hours, he tells us nothing about it. Not the assassin’s name. Not the name of the organization behind the killing. Not the ghost of a motive for the deed. In a political thriller, this would be merely crass; in Gandhi it is something worse. Gandhi was murdered by Nathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu-fanatic RSS, who blamed the Mahatma for the Partition of India. But in the film the killer is not differentiated from the crowd; he simply steps out of the crowd with a gun. This could mean one of three things: that he repres
ents the crowd—that the people turned against Gandhi, that the mob threw up a killer who did its work; that Godse was ‘one lone nut’, albeit a lone nut under the influence of a sinister-looking sadhu in a rickshaw; or that Gandhi is Christ in a loincloth, and the assassination is the crucifixion, which needs no explanation. We know why Christ died. He died that others might live. But Godse was not representative of the crowd. He did not work alone. And the killing was a political, not a mystical, act. Attenborough’s distortions mythologize, but they also lie.

  Ah, but, we are told, the film is a biography, not a political work. Even if one accepts this distinction (surely spurious in the case of a life lived so much in public), one must reply that a biography, if it is not to turn into hagiography, must tackle the awkward aspects of the subject as well as the lovable side. The brahmacharya experiments, during which Gandhi would lie with young naked women all night to test his will-to-abstain, are well known, not without filmic possibilities, and they are, of course, ambiguous events. The film omits them. It also omits Gandhi’s fondness for Indian billionaire industrialists (he died, after all, in the house of the richest of them, Birla House in Delhi). Surely this is a rich area for a biographer to mine: the man of the masses, dedicated to the simple life, self-denial, asceticism, who was financed all his life by super-capitalist patrons, and, some would say, hopelessly compromised by them? A written biography which failed to enter such murky waters would not be worth reading. We should not be less critical of a film.