Summary
Novelist whose 1984 diagnosis of Raj revisionism, and whose account of being outside the whale, Edward Said takes up in Culture and Imperialism; the crisis over his The Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa is Said’s instance of how volatile the imperial legacy remains when race relations are involved (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.44, p.48 / printed p.17, p.21).
Details
- In 1984, well before The Satanic Verses appeared, Rushdie diagnosed the spate of films and articles about the British Raj, including the television series The Jewel in the Crown and David Lean’s film of A Passage to India, noting that the nostalgia pressed into service by these affectionate recollections of British rule in India coincided with the Falklands War: “the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain” (quoted, PDF p.48 / printed p.21).
- Commentators responded to what they considered Rushdie’s wailing and whining and disregarded his principal point; the issue taken up instead was whether the Third World had declined after emancipation, on the argument that it was better to listen to a ruthlessly honest V. S. Naipaul than an absurdly posturing Rushdie (PDF p.48 / printed p.21).
- Rushdie’s terms for modern reality, quoted by Said, describe a whaleless world without quiet corners in which “there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss” — borrowing George Orwell’s description of the intellectual’s place as inside and outside the whale (PDF p.48 / printed p.21).
- Said quotes Rushdie again against withdrawing “the West” from its experiences in the “peripheral world”: it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep, and outside the whale objectivity becomes an unattainable goal for which one must struggle — the world of Samuel Beckett’s formula: I can’t go on, I’ll go on (PDF p.54 / printed p.27).