Madrid (EFE).- The writer Salman Rushdie stated this Monday that literature “cannot change the world” and that “literature, poetry and the novel cannot be given a strength and power that they do not have” in this world “of lies” where “false narratives” predominate.
This was stated by the British-American writer of Indian origin (Mumbai, 1947) during an event held this Monday at the Ateneo de Madrid, where he spoke with the writer Javier Cercas and the journalist Montserrat Domínguez on the occasion of the promotion in Spain of his latest memoir ‘Cuchillo (Meditations after an Attempted Murder’) (Penguin Random House).
A work describing his assassination attempt, on August 12, 2022, when, at the age of 75, he was participating in a conference in New York state and 35 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late Iranian leader, issued a ‘ fatwa’ or edict calling for his death after having written ‘The Satanic Verses’ in 1988.
About literature and wars
“You can’t change the world through literature, and my editor in London says that her biggest mistake was discarding Jane Fonda’s book. It is very rare for a book to have a direct effect on man (…) When we are faced with horror and atrocity, how can literature confront it”, she questioned.
According to the author, this is “very difficult” and he has lamented that in the face of “these wars (Ukraine and Palestine)” there are very “few useful things” that creators can do: “in Ukraine you can give a voice to those who suffer from war, amplify those voices and that is something that writers can do to support the victims.”
“Putin says that the Ukrainians are Nazis, and we have Trump saying that the previous elections were a fraud, and there are many Americans who think that this was the case and that the last elections were stolen from him, and it is a very dangerous situation,” he criticized.
“We find ourselves in a world of false narratives that are presented to us and instilled in us, if you dedicate yourself to storytelling you have to do something about it and novelists often end up telling the truth strangely,” Rushdie, to whom Javier Cercas has described it as “ironistic.”
And Rushdie has confirmed that, for him, “fanaticism excludes humor,” which is why he decided to use it in this work: “Humor is a response to fanaticism because it is something that fanaticism does not possess. This book that came about from an act of horrible fanaticism and is a pretty funny book, it shouldn’t be, but it is. I love the tone of the book, it is not heavy, didactic, it is light, full of comedy, they are not jokes or pranks, but humor.”
During the hour he spoke with Cercas and Domínguez at the Ateneo, where the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, attended, he reviewed the time he spent in the hospital, just as he does in the book, and recalled how When he was stabbed by a man who was in the audience at an event he was starring in, he heard a “voice” that told him “don’t die, don’t die.”
“I think that that vital force that spoke to me made me overcome the situation, it is something that perhaps we all have, a survival instinct that we may not be aware of,” he added.
With a “normal” life, although surrounded by great security measures, the writer has explained that he has refused to speak with the perpetrator of his attack because he thought he was going to answer “a banality”, so he chose to use his “ novelistic skills.”
During the event he confessed his adoration for Gabriel García Márquez, whom he did not meet but with whom he had a telephone conversation; “García Márquez said that he didn’t understand English, but I think he did, and my Spanish was quite bad, we spoke as best we could, but it was very fun,” concluded this lover of literature in Spanish.
